I was 11 in 1999 so the only thing I remember about the Internet from that period was porn and my cousin playing Quake with his friends in Pakistan. I barely remember what life was like before Google.
AltaVista’s advanced search (e.g. the NEAR statement) was extremely effective. Google was never as good even in its best days, nevermind now.
That’s overstating it. There’s a reason Google took over: it was better pretty much all around. The original Google algorithm was a really amazing tool for finding quality content on the web as it existed in those days. That was before SEO drove all these focused efforts on gaming the system.
With that said, Alta Vista definitely was the most promising tool before Google, and it had some potential if it hadn’t been so poorly managed by DEC. They simply saw it as a cool demo for their Alpha server platform, and never had any vision for it as a meaningful product on its own.
Sure, but it was the best tool for science/technology searches, in the hand of an expert user. I’m still bitter all subsequent search engines were inferior in that respect.
it was chaotic and it was awesome.
randomness of the early internet was a gift.
It was small. We had printed guides for websites!
Basically, it was as shit then as Google is currently. Actually, it was still slightly better; at least they acknowledged operator signs in the search (+, -, putting phrases in quotes, etc). Google doesn’t even do that anymore.
I think it was better solely for the fact that you wouldn’t get ads in your search results
There were search engine before Google.
Bring back the web crawlers/spiders, you could find anything
I had a list of websites to visit that I kept on a notebook because the only internet I had available was at a cybercafé
Open discovery is a hard problem.
If that seems pseudo-science speak to seem smart, I mean that you need some prior trust. Just like with PGP. Some axioms. In year 2002 those axioms were people you meet IRL and links you saw printed. Now these have been erased as a Web discovery mechanism, so to not compete with search engines and platforms. Links are login-walled and short-living most of the time. People are discouraged from making their own pages and sharing links.
My Kademlia experiment is more working than not, slowly moving to split core and UI there, to have replaceable cores. Want to try F2F. Especially since it even looks more like something that would work F2F way better. I’ve learned that I’m not as smart as I think while making it. Still don’t have anything resembling indirect reputation, but eventually I want to make that, for some kind of “public” media, where you need to filter the sewer stream.
(No, I won’t share, it’s a P2P program written in TCL/Tk, entirely, not just UI, except for some bindings in C that weren’t done by someone else. It seemed easier to start with, with asynchronous style being very easy there, but I’ve recently tried writing some other thing in Python and realized just how easier and faster Python is due to everything not being a string, however boring that critique of TCL would seem.)
The web used to be so small that Yahoo! had real humans doing the categorizing.
A few years ago while cleaning out my late grandmother’s house, I found a physical book which was just a listing and description of various websites.
I was a dmoz editor for a bit. They created the directory that Yahoo used on their site. Kind of wish directories came back.
Directories and webrings
Webrings are still a thing. I see them from time to time.
I can’t remember the last time I did. Have one in mind?
Here is a whole directory of them as a starter. Many retro pages from this directory but many sites are active and get regular updates.
Yahoo for a while was becoming the world wide web, messenger, clubs, search, email and games all engaged with on a single identity, even turned down an offer to buy Google. Then it packed it all away and went home.
Ive heard it still has a titan presence in Japan though
Yahoo Japan is actually a completely separate company.
Yahoo itself is still extremely popular in the US, just with a different demographic than we (the sort of people on the fediverse) regularly interact with. Their sports, finance, and news sites are some of the most popular on the internet. I don’t think it’s particularly relevant in the web search space these days though, and hasn’t been for a long time.
I think we don’t hear much about it because it has found a niche and is staying within it. It’s profitable, but not on an “infinite growth forever” trajectory so it rarely makes the news. Honestly kind of respectable.
Yeah if you back too far it sucked. If you go to far toward the present it sucks too. Bell curve of performance which is not what I would have expected, but it’s what we got. Paid optimization has really fucked it.
The peak was during the period you could say “If you search on Google for ___ you get ___.” Back when it was predictable. When they started personalizing results was the moment they sliced society’s brake lines.
I remember…I had a Windows 8.1 machine, I needed to SSH into a Raspberry Pi. No Powershell, no native SSH client, the easiest way to get one was to install PuTTY. So I googled “putty”. All lowercase, search engines sometimes get fucky when you start doing caps and punctuation, etc. I got an entire page of results for and about the TTY client, and nothing about drywall spackle or non-newtonian children’s toys. Because I often search for stuff like that, it made a bet and went all in.
The horrifying part of that is, that innocuous example makes it sound great. I didn’t have to overcome the “why did you name it that?” problem and refine the search by adding “tty client” or something like that. By getting to know me it took me to exactly what I wanted to find. When trying to find utility software, that’s okay. That’s not all people search the web for.
Now it’s hooked up to the “You’re right to call me out on that” machine, we’re sliding down the mountainside upside down on fire.
Yeah, I used to type “putty download”, click “I’m feeling lucky”, and go.
It worked 100% of the time. I wouldn’t try it these days, even if I needed putty.
Well how prominent will plumber’s putty or silly putty have the word Download on a page?
Any information was available but its veracity was always questioned. And this was before Wikipedia too so the only reliable sources were Encarta and Britannica unless you had a very cutting edge library.
Cool article. I remember the good and the bad. When it comes to search, it has gotten worse over time. I’d love to use some early 2000s Google again. It wasn’t perfect, but the bones were there.
Ask jeeves was better at one point. It was an actual toss up which search engine was going to go well early 2000s.
Yep, Jeeves was really popular for a while. I was an Alta Vista fan for a while too. It was one of my favorite early searches.
What I really miss about early web searching is the cached pages where you could see all your highlighted search terms exactly where they appear on the page. Modern google dumps you at the front door to the corporate walled garden and you usually have to search again with some shitty embedded search tool. Old Google would link you to a .htm or .html page with the exact answer.
Oh yeah that was good.
Metacrawler FTW!
