The web used to be so small that Yahoo! had real humans doing the categorizing.
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.
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
I remember Google coming out and changing everything.
It had billions of pages instead of millions.
It returned results in seconds, and by seconds I mean 2-3, not 60.
Everything else became irrelevant overnight.
Now Google search is shit.
it’s not just google
for the past year or so I’ve been telling people that DDG is so much better as it actually returns the results you’re looking for, which Google stopped doing. except in the past few months, the same thing is happening there now too.
I don’t know if it’s fuckery with the search engines, people gaming SEO, ads, or if it’s just the sheer quantity of shit that’s on the internet now, but it’s at least half of the time now that I go to search something and it’s not in the top half dozen results. and sometimes I can’t even find it at all, despite knowing that it definitely exists out there.
DDG been shit for years. I went for it when their campaign was about not being in q bubble and getting unfiltered results. For yesrs everything that came back was hyper local. Search a name you get a doctor or history or spelling correction of someone in my town of 30,000 people or their ancestor. Turn off location puts something generic in top place and then everything else after as normal.
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.
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?
These day’s I’d be more worried that I’d be taken to some malware infested lookalike.
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
Plus zero LLM slop everywhere.
Well yeah, but that’s a recent development
Some things about the Internet back then really sucked. However, pre-SEO and AI bullshit Internet search was significantly superior to what we have now.
I remember when the first result was worth reading.
Bring back the web crawlers/spiders, you could find anything
At least I could finger people from a distance
I see you. Not enough people are going to get this one.
I’m getting so old
I feel ya. Pass the ibuprofen.
It isn’t a bad thing though, especially compared to what serching the internet has become.
God I miss surfing
Come join KSF! Surf is still very much alive there :D
Tell me more about KSF
KSF is the world standard for the surf mini game in Counter Strike. It is primarily played on Counter Strike Source and is completely free. They have a global leaderboard where you can compete in getting the fastest times on maps against everyone. It’s an incredibly welcoming and friendly community (in my experience). You can find out more about how to connect at their site here https://ksf.surf/ :)
I didn’t realize it was CS surf haha. That’s pretty cool.
I know that surfing can get pretty technical fast. Thanks for answering.
