Assuming porn is #1 (Just to get that out of the way)
It was argued on a GD thread that Wikipedia is the best internet development, and the sheer amount of knowledge makes it a look-first place for anything. I’ve always wondered where my mandibula was…
I would also say Google Earth, where you can practically explore the whole world, see 3-D mountains and skylines, get great directions, let others know where you’ve been (no more highlighting atlases or thumbtacking poster maps). My new addiction is that street view, almost like actually visiting the places.
Google destroys them all by a long-shot and many other prominent inventions in history. I am not sure if you knew the pre-Google world but, trust me, you don’t want to. Older search engines gave you results but you might have to look through 20 pages of results to find something similar to what you were looking for.
YouTube has a lot of popular attraction but I don’t know if I could rate it very high because you could always look at video clips all over the place before it became popular.
I also think Wikipedia is good. It doesn’t get enough credit for the way that it works. Before it was invented, no one would have believed that you could just throw up a blank encyclopedia and just watch it build itself. That is an extraordinary exploit on human nature. If I threw a few random car parts into my driveway with a crayon sketch, should I expect to wake up on the morning to find all kinds of experts putting the finishing touches on my new sports car? That is what Wikipedia accomplishes.
I’d say Wikipedia, which I agree does not get enough credit. People who like to think they are smart take a strong stance against it, ignoring how useful and valid it can be.
I would never research a major paper using it, but it is quite reliable(given enough time) for most things.
Wikipedia. Simply because there will never be another hour-long argument about what school Joe Namath went to or who was Nixon’s VP candidate in 1960 or what was the name of the band that the other guy from Nirvana started.
*Alabama
*Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr.
*Sweet 75
No more hour long arguments about random trivia that no gives a crap about. 5 seconds on wikipedia and the conversation can move on.
Google, for sure. I DO remember the pre-Google days, and how frustrating it was to type in your search word and come up with 123,232,789 results, the first ten thousand having absolutely nothing to do with whatever it was you were searching for.
Today I had to look up some relatively obscure public health goals for some Eastern European countries. Google found 'em for me in a few seconds. Fantastic.
Google is good, but Wikipedia plays a large role in making Google as good as it currently is (by providing quality content to link to). I’d have to put Wikipedia at the top, and Google second.
I rank them reversed. I use Wikipedia maybe once a week. Google is used hourly. It is my homepage. Neither I nor most people I know could get through the workday much less the off-hours without it.
Need a quick discussion about some procedure? Need to know where a lat lon is? Heck, I am afraid my brain has shut down in favor of Googling it.
Google by an order of magnitude. Certainly Wikipedia helps by giving an easy link, but frankly I rarely end up looking at that link. Too many other more appropriate links ahead of that one.
Google, And It’s. Not. Even. Close. (Assuming that Google is here used as a shorthand for “efficient search engines,” of which there are now several.)
Without Google, the internet is a useful tool for some businesses and a cool toy for most users. With Google, it is (by leaps and bounds) the the most comprehensive and efficient cache of knowledge and art in all of human history, and it is accessible to almost anyone for a nominal fee. As far as inventions go, Google is an inner-circle Hall of Famer.
When we were little, we used to talk about having a “homework machine”. A robot you could ask any question and it would spout out the answer. Now we have it: the Google search bar!
I stick by my assertion in that thread that Wikipedia was the best internet invention. Google is pretty cool, but it didn’t really revolutionize anything. Google was the internet equivalent of what would happen to the automobile industry if someone could manufacture a car that was cheaper and better than all other cars. It would be cool, and convenient, and everyone would use it, but it wouldn’t be the best invention ever.
As stated by other posters, the fact that it doesn’t suck. Remember the old Altavista, Ask Jeeves, Dogpile days, trying to find a relevant search result amid the mountains of crap?
It’s the PageRank algorithm. It’s complicated, but as I understand it it weighs the importance of the page by the number and ranks of other pages linking to it, rather than just by the number of times the search term appears on the page, which is how most of the older search engines worked.
Now, when I got started on the Net (late 96), Altavista was teh Bomb! L And it did serve me much better than any other search engine of the time. I remember IMing with a friend who’d been searching for the sheet music for Fur Elise for 30 min on other engines. Av got it for me in a minute.
Yes, people would code Godzilla Godzilla Godzilla Godzilla Godzilla Godzilla Godzilla Godzilla Godzilla ad nauseum on the top of their page, in the meta tags, etc, just to move up there. You click and get a fan site with 10 pictures and Godzilla is kewl with moving gifs and blinking fonts.
(Just to get that out of the way)