Back in Time #32 – Search Engines, Google Wave, and the First Metaverse

Dozens of news items appear on Tweakers every day, but when we write we rarely know how the products, techniques and developments we discuss will end. In this section we read old messages and see what happened next.

Twenty years ago: search engines and PDAs

When you think of search engines, you think of Google. Maybe in twenty years we'll look back at old articles and think, “Oh yeah, Google, that was still around then,” just as we think now about the dozens of search engines that tried to become the biggest at the beginning of this century. We wrote about this in 2004: then suddenly two new Dutch-made search engines were released. One of these was Kijken.nl, a sister site of Vinden.nl, a Startpagina-like index site that was very popular decades ago. Kijken.nl was initially acquired by Quote Media and later by an investment company called Orbys. Kijken.nl is now part of another company, Visymo, which makes search technology based on other search engines such as Google, Bing and Yandex.

Remarkably, Kijken.nl still exists and the search engine works properly. Like most alternative search engines today, Kijken.nl is an aggregator, including through Google search results. That is the way every search engine works nowadays, but in 2004 the opportunities for Google alternatives were still open. For example, we wrote earlier in May of that year that Google's market share 'barely increased'. Admittedly, the search engine was already the largest at the time with a market share of 56.4 percent, but Yahoo and MSN Search still had unthinkably large market shares of 21.1 and 9.2 percent. You were also still hopeful that alternative search engines had a chance. “Zoeken.nl looks good,” wrote TheEagle, for example. “It may not be as good as Google, but it is certainly a nice alternative. Since Google is becoming increasingly commercial, it is necessary that there are some good competitors. Because all those advertising plans from Google will have a negative impact on user-friendliness of the search engine.”

Specialized search engines also appeared more and more often in those years. In addition to Kijken.nl, Kijknieuws.nl was also released. It has now become defunct. Kijknieuws.nl was specifically intended to search for news, based on its own database that included headlines and television and radio broadcasts. It started with 180,000 such headlines. A crawler then scanned news sources and stored that information, creating a news archive. There were also websites that specifically looked for online music, such aszoekmp3.nl. One thing that has certainly not changed in those twenty years is the wrath of the Brein Foundation led by Tim Kuik. This was proven wrong in May 2004 in a lawsuit againstzoekmp3.nl, because the site 'only referred users to sites where those files can be found'. The online discourse and precedent surrounding linking to copyrighted material has changed somewhat, but the fact that Brein is still pursuing lawsuits has remained the same.

In the first years of this century, a month without a new PDA was a month wasted. There were several personal digital assistants on the way at the time. There were already plenty of precursors to smartphones at that time, but the news about future models just kept pouring in. In this news item we wrote about several upcoming models of Pocket PCs that were equipped with Windows Mobile 2003, which was announced in June of that year. Companies that are no longer known for their mobile skills tried to enter the pocket computer market in 2004. It turned out that HP wanted to release the iPAQ h6300, although there were few rumors about this at the time, except that this model would run the mobile operating system.

Photos also emerged of Toshiba's e830 PDA, which looked very similar to the earlier e800 model but got a new XScale processor with a clock speed of a whopping 520MHz, which was very fast for a pocket computer at the time. A photo of ASUS' MyPal A730 also appeared online. It had a 3.7-inch VGA screen and the same Scale processor.

Fifteen years ago: Windows 7, Google Wave and wrong predictions about blue envelopes

If we have to be completely honest in this editorial office, we think Windows 7 is perhaps the best operating system there has been. At least, from Microsoft's operating systems. Windows 7 was released in October 2009, which meant 15 years ago that we wrote a lot about the new leaks, rumors and discoveries about the OS. Acer quickly leaked the final release date, which turned out to be correct except for one day. A few days after the leaks, Microsoft confirmed that the OS would be released that year.

Of course, not everything about the operating system came as unexpected news. For example, at the beginning of the month it was clear from a Release Candidate of the OS that the system requirements for the 64bit version had increased considerably. You needed at least 2GB of memory and 20GB of disk space. Not only did those requirements increase significantly compared to the previous Windows Vista: the requirements for netbooks also increased considerably, we wrote at the time. The netbook makers could choose a Start edition or a Starter for Small Notebook PC edition.

Another thing that might increase in Windows 7: the price. Dell even suspected that the price of the operating system could become a barrier for customers who might want to switch. With Windows Vista those costs were already higher than with Windows XP, but with Windows 7 they could increase even further and customers may not want to switch to the OS at all. That turned out not to be a big problem; Windows 7 quickly gained market share and quickly became Microsoft's most popular OS.

In any case, May 2009 was a month of wrong predictions, including from Microsoft itself. Knowing what we know today, the company seemed childishly naive at the time when it said, “Android is not a threat to Windows Mobile.” The company did not see Android as a serious competitor, because Microsoft focused mainly on business users with Windows Mobile. “When we launch Windows Mobile 6.5, we will compete with the Blackberry Storm and the T-Mobile G1,” the company said at the time. “If we enter the Storm and G1 market, we will be a new player.” That turned out to be the other way around. Business users increasingly switched to Android as more and better smartphones were released that had good support for e-mail, for example. We know how things ended with Windows Mobile. Microsoft evolved it into Windows Phone, but was never able to compete with Android and iOS.

Another prediction that did not come true was that the Tax Authorities wanted to get rid of the dreaded blue envelope. “All citizens should handle their tax affairs via the internet,” the tax authorities wrote in 2009. In that year, confidence in the internet still seemed limitless; the tax authorities could 'impose more accurate assessments' and 'provide better information about possible allowances' through the internet. That also turned out differently in practice. In fact, ICT causes dozens of problems for the Tax Authorities, ranging from tips about fraud that remain unanswered to the inability to adjust VAT rates.

But above all, the blue envelope still exists, fifteen years after that first statement. This does not only have to do with the ICT problems. In recent years, sentiment surrounding digitalization in government has turned somewhat and become more conservative. The previous Rutte cabinets had already included strict requirements regarding the digital accessibility of the government, with the caveat that communication must always remain possible in the traditional way. Visiting the counter, calling someone, sending a letter: State Secretary Alexandra van Huffelen of Digitalization, among others, advocated this. That blue envelope will not disappear in the coming years.

What did appear in 2009 was one of Google's most revolutionary products ever. The company introduced Wave, a cloud communications service that allowed users in one workspace to collaborate on documents. The most striking feature was that users could see what each other was doing in real time, such as adding texts or creating spreadsheets.

Wave was relatively quickly added to the graveyard of written-off Google products. In early 2012, 2.5 years after the beta release, Google put Wave into reading mode. On April 30, 2012, Google finally pulled the plug. But while many Google products were simply left behind, Wave has always had a big impact on the company. The technologies behind it were quickly implemented in the Docs, Sheets and Slides online office suite. Google Wave ran so Google Docs could run.

Ten years ago: Metaverse before square BlackBerrys

In 2021, Facebook changed its name to Meta and the company started to focus entirely on 'the metaverse'. Since then, one of the big questions from analysts has been what a metaverse actually is. Should we compare it to the world of Ready Player One? Is Fortnite a metaverse? If you look back at the news from 2014, you will see that the discussion goes back further than Meta's name change. Then Oculus came up with the idea for its own metaverse, as became apparent during an interview given by the then CEO at the time. That was about two months after Facebook acquired Oculus, something we already wrote about in the previous Back in Time. Brenden Iribe said in the interview that he wanted to make an mmo for the Oculus Rift. Iribe had high ambitions: he expected that eventually 'a billion players would be able to play in it simultaneously'. “Facebook is a good start, it could well become a metaverse that can join other virtual worlds,” Iribe said. A metaverse before it was cool, that's how Oculus saw it back then.

Nowadays there is not as much progress in tablets as there was a few years ago, but 2014 was perhaps the peak for innovation within this product group, where at the time the hope was that it could replace the smartphone. Apple released the first iPad in 2010, but in 2014 its competitors also started to gain momentum. In May 2014, new rumors emerged about a successor to Samsung's Galaxy Tab S, with the biggest difference being that it would have a 13.3-inch screen. That would be the company's largest tablet to date and is still a big one even today. The current largest tablet in the Galaxy Tab series is the Tab S9 Ultra with a 14.6-inch display. Samsung has now also made larger tablets, such as the Galaxy View with a screen size of 18.4 inches, but in practice such tablets are increasingly being made as laptops.

In 2014, the first rumors emerged about a device that may have a smaller size, but a very interesting form factor. BlackBerry then hinted at a device with a square screen. Little was known about it in May 2014, according to a message we wrote at the time, except that the device would have a screen with a resolution of 1440×1440 pixels and a screen diagonal of 4.5 inches.

We indeed knew little about the device at the time, but it later turned out to be the BlackBerry Passport, which we discussed in a review in November 2014. The square screen turned out to be a good move and made it easy to read things, but it turned out to be mainly the software that caused problems. The device ran BB OS 10.3 and also supported Android apps in a roundabout way, but there were too few native apps to make the device a real success. The Passport became one of BlackBerry's last attempts at the consumer hardware market, but the once iconic brand has now all but disappeared.

2014 was also the year that Windows 7, which we wrote about earlier in this article, was not inferior in popularity, but that was not because Microsoft did not try. Microsoft put Windows 8 firmly in the shop window. The operating system should bridge the gap between PCs and mobile devices such as smartphones; Windows 8 had a tile UI that should eventually work on Windows Mobile devices. For a moment it seemed that a new device from LG was on the way; leaker Evan Blass showed possible renders of an LG device with that operating system, although it later turned out that it was probably a hoax.

Windows 8 was the operating system in which Microsoft started with major updates that were also named, such as it already does with Windows 11 and its Moment updates. For example, Windows 8.1 received an update simply called Update 1, which could cause problems. Some users saw little point in upgrading and decided not to. Windows 8.1 Update 1 was released in April 2014, but a month later a large number of users had not performed the update and Microsoft was forced to continue to release updates for the old operating system. In the years that followed, Microsoft would push harder and harder to give users updates and upgrades, even to this day.