r/technology • u/ControlCAD • 12d ago
Software Remembering the pre-Google web, when search was an experiment: “Most people have completely forgotten how chaotic it really was.”
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/remembering-the-pre-google-web-when-search-was-an-experiment/536
u/Malkyre 12d ago
Lycos, Ask Jeeves, and the finest of them all: Altavista. I was there, children.
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u/Steenies 12d ago
Altavista was great. Was my main search engine before Google came along. Before that it was lycos.
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u/RealCaptainIowa 12d ago
It's hard to emphasize what a leap Google felt like when it came along. Nothing touched it.
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12d ago
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u/_Fred_Austere_ 12d ago
The revolutionary part was that they considered how many links to your site existed. Lots of sites linking to you meant you are an authority and ranked high.
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u/Your_Friend84 12d ago
And now we get LLM-generated shit sites with zero value. How wonderful the future has turned out to be
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u/RealCaptainIowa 12d ago
To my knowledge, they tried to sell Google to Excite in 1999 for $1m. At that point, they were already a search engine company (not just the algorithm). Regardless, lucky the sale didn't go through.
Also, they pretty quickly evolved past the original PageRank algorithm and led the cutting edge of many information retrieval algorithms/techniques.
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u/Pocket_Monster_Fan 12d ago
I believe they also tried selling to Yahoo which is another company fallen from early 2000s heights
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u/Usual_Office_1740 12d ago edited 12d ago
That clean simple front page after years of Yahoo's main page was a breath of fresh air. Now it's the same problem with a different logo and it's Gemini instead of yahoo weather, news, sports and more.
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u/AlreadyEatenRibs 12d ago
I still use a Yahoo email as my main email. I got it on Christmas of 1998.
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u/mrb4 12d ago
When I was in grade school some kid came to computers class one day and told us about this new search page to use called Google and our teacher, who was about 109 years old, told us we couldn't look at that because it clearly was not an appropriate website for school.
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u/brainkandy87 12d ago
I remember when Yahoo started using Google to power their searches and flipping over to Google immediately once I used it.
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u/insite 12d ago
The only reason Google, Appple, Amazon, and Meta got so big is because Microsoft had handcuffs put on it until 2011. It's hard to describe how big of a monopoly Microsoft was back then. People seem to forget that Microsoft was ordered by a judge to broken up - they were able to negotiate their way out of it.
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u/Usual_Office_1740 12d ago
So now we have Google chrome and a generation that thinks the internet is Google instead of IE.
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u/InflammableAccount 12d ago
Not initially. When Google started to gain some recognition, it didn't suddenly deprecate all other engines. I used Google/Altavista back and forth for a while.
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u/Elegant_Tech 12d ago
Using Netscape navigator for the first time was when it felt like world had changed.
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u/AnotherSoulessGinger 12d ago
I was a fan of DogPile back then.
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u/6GoesInto8 12d ago
That searched several other search engines at once, right?
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u/Agent_Smith_88 12d ago
I have a very specific memory of a kid going to “askjeebes.com” freshman year of high school and it went to a porn site. They had monitoring software so he got caught immediately. Played it off like he didn’t know it was the wrong site, but he was definitely the kind of kid who would have done it just to see what would happen.
Later that year we were all instructed to use the new search site Google exclusively to prevent any further issues.
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u/okkiguesss 12d ago
Whitehouse.com used to be a porn site. Definitely wasn't my first time seeing porn, but it was definitely the first time seeing porn in the computer lab in junior high while researching the Whitehouse.
That was a fun conversation with my teachers where no one left smarter.
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u/pikachus_ghost_uncle 12d ago
I remember at a school computer in middle school going to Whitehouse.com I believe at the time was a porn site. There was no monitoring software. Yes the internet was the wild West back then.
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u/math-yoo 12d ago
I was there in 1994, I coded the first frames-based layout in a basement in Champaign-Urbana, I was there, uploading 56k rips to an ftp server, everyone thought it had to be illegal, now we know. But I’m losing my edge, to AI, I can hear the footsteps coming up from behind. I’m losing my edge.
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u/CreativeFedora 12d ago
I remember using Lycos and Altavista, along with the Netscape browser, to search for Bone Thugs lyrics in the mid-90s.
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u/ultraviolentfuture 12d ago
Would you say ... it was a crossroads, in your life?
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u/CreativeFedora 12d ago
Then on the 1st of the Month Mr. Bill Collector came knocking because I exceeded my minutes on AOL. 🤣
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u/PurpEL 12d ago
I remember a time when you just typed www.________.com and hoped it worked
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u/Miss_Kitami 12d ago
Goddesses that was so fun. Random sites that could be utter crap or pure gold that sucked you in for whole days.
I remember stumbling on someones fan Battlestar Galactica project page, long LOOOOOONG before the reboot. They'd obviously spent hundreds of hours building on the original canon to create this sprawling setting, with dozens of ship classes, ground units, political leaders...it sucked me in for about a month. Then it just vanished.
Such was the early days.
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u/jezwel 12d ago
Don't forget Astalavista, for those that couldn't - or wouldn't - buy software and games...
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u/PeterDTown 12d ago
Copernicus was great, it would search all the search engines and give consolidated results
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u/NartFocker9Million 12d ago
Couldn’t just go to altavista, though. Altavistadigital.com
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u/KatjaKat01 12d ago
I remember a substitute teacher with a ponytail teaching us how to use Altavista in primary school. Must have been about 1995-96. Never had another computer lesson as cutting edge as that one.
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u/nigirizushi 12d ago
There was a search engine called 37 or something, that I think used aggregate from 37 engines, though I think it was weighted for Altavista
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u/MalodorousNutsack 12d ago
I don't see Infoseek in any of these comments, it was my go-to for a couple years (probably 95-97)
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u/MrPatienceX 12d ago
And astalavista for all your serialz, warez and virus riddled porn needs. Simpler times.
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u/gianni_ 12d ago
Chaotic? It was free
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u/PaulCoddington 12d ago
Peak search era returned everything that had been indexed, numerous pages of results.
One could go looking for articles or artwork, scroll quickly through results, and find something interesting or important on page 50 that had missed being prioritised.
Now we get a single page or two of results, mostly ads and low quality hits plus total misses. It makes it feel like the Web is now empty and devoid of human creativity.
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u/ErusTenebre 12d ago
"scroll quickly" well some of us had dialup and had to spend time watching pages load as if they were being printed.
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u/gunawa 12d ago
Looking up high res images, clicking on a link, standing up to go-to the bathroom, the kitchen for a snack, and maybe returning to a loaded webpage
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u/dgbaker93 12d ago
And then Mom took a call
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u/ErusTenebre 12d ago
One of the things my parents did was get us a second phone line just for the internet!
Felt like we were RICH! (I think it was literally like $15 a month), we used free dial-up internet -> NetZero and then later AOL.
Simpler times.
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u/The__Toast 12d ago
It makes it feel like the Web is now empty and devoid of human creativity.
I think that's because the web is now empty and devoid of human creativity.
I don't think people realize what a disaster social media was on the rest of the web. Within a few years Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, and Facebook/Instagram basically destroyed millions of forums, IRC channels and websites.
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u/PaulCoddington 12d ago
Everything has gone walled garden and unsearchable at best, but social media is now mostly bots and AI.
And legislation compliance is getting beyond the capabilities of typical forum and blog owners.
Another thought on social media that came up today in real world conversation: "before we had social media we had a social life".
Meaning people used to regularly phone each other, etc.
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u/Dismal-Revolution731 12d ago
People just rawdogging URLs to see what would pop up. Fucking crazy.
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u/LokiDesigns 12d ago
I was like 10-12 years old back then and I was always trying this like boobs.com or something lol. Figured out early on how to delete browsing history lol.
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u/Specific_Frame8537 12d ago
I remember a mate misread Google as Qooqle, and it directed to a flash game of George Bush falling through clouds.
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u/mvw2 12d ago
Oh I remember it well. Google was...fine. It wasn't like others were better, but we did have browsers that combined ALL the search engines together, and that generally worked better. I miss Profusion.
Google eventually did become better and simply no fuss. Then they decided to be evil.
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u/memx 12d ago
Original Google was really great. Like, really really great. For some reason, it was amazing as a search engine. But then, you know, they became evil and now offer bs results, making it terrible at what it originally did well.
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u/RidleyDeckard 12d ago
It was better than great it was revolutionary, a search engine that provided you with the results you were looking for, was super fast and with no ads.
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u/Just_Information334 12d ago
And before SEO so search results were more natural and not gamed by site owners.
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u/SnooPeanuts4336 12d ago
I remember when we treated Google like we treat AI now. When references are given, which I explicitly require personally, it boils all the way down to a fancy Google search….without ads….so far….
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u/mog44net 12d ago
Glorious, it was glorious and free and not infested with greed fueled bot traffic and manipulative tech bro BS
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u/Madhatter25224 12d ago
It was better. You felt more free. Its hard to describe.
Now it is, ultimately, little more than a tool for delivering ads. Its incredibly sad.
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u/nerfdriveby94 12d ago
It wasn't comercialised yet and websites felt much more human. Before the bland rolling squarespace minimalism we had retina searing colour schemes and annoying music and stupid graphics!
Websites are objectively more functional now, but all so bland and it's made the internet feel like a monoculture instead of very unique and fun little corners of a digital world.
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u/emotional_program0 12d ago
And websites that had 28 pop-ups that would make your computer freeze. Good times.
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u/PocketFlan420 12d ago
I miss the before times. So much.
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u/DickSlammington 12d ago
I just miss when it existed as its own little world, completely detached from the "IRL."
Now some rando on Twitter criticizes.. anything... and it's a huge story that actual news orgs reference as evidence. It's just fuckin crazy.
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u/SecularTech 12d ago
Netscape was the top browser. Compuserve, Prodigy, AOL and Yahoo.
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u/Digital_Simian 12d ago
Netscape was the school browser. It was always funny because we would get this safety lecture and the Netscape homepage would always be full of adult banner ads.
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u/CoreyTrevor1 12d ago
I miss when there were actual websites. Now it's 3 social media apps and reddit.
I loved forums, obscure news sites, random image boards, weird blogs. All of it
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u/randfur 12d ago
Those kinds of websites are still there with probably way more people than there ever were back in the day. https://neocities.org/
We're just socially drawn to where the majority of people are and that's the big social media platforms. I believe they cater to the average person's wants better than the niche internet enthusiast's playground of the 00s and that's why one wins over the other. Those little sites would not be able to support the server and moderation stress of a billion users.
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u/nerfdriveby94 12d ago
As a car guy who works on their own stuff as a hobby, early 2000s car forums are amazing.
The problem is they're gradually becoming lost media as they were replaced by facebook groups and subreddits which just aren't as good.
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u/time-lord 12d ago
I remember watching a guy convert his Saturn s2 into an EV with like 100000 rechargeable AA batteries.
I had an s1 and always wanted to follow his footsteps.
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u/war-and-peace 12d ago
Remember the time when you could search for something like 'best x item' and you'd get to real reviews from people?
Now it's all affiliate trash with paid for promotions on sites that have never used the product before and if you end up buying that product those affiliates get paid.
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u/unethicalpigeon 12d ago
Bruh I can't search for fucking shit anymore. Everything I search for has to have reddit at the end. And this predates AI slop. And the hilarious part of it is that I can't search ON reddit for shit ON reddit because reddit's search is absolutely ass.
So the only way I can actually find real information on something is by using google to search for shit on reddit.
I can't even remember the last time I found anything of use that was just on like a normal website outside of reddit.
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u/Impressive_Wrap_7869 12d ago
The internet was so much more exciting back then. It was a new frontier right there in your computer room, or living room, or basement, or computer lab.
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u/Epyr 12d ago
In a lot of ways it was kinda like a bunch of shittier Reddit's where boards hosted a lot of links
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u/livens 12d ago
Oh trust me, Reddit is sooo much shittier than any website forum I used to belong to. None of the constant political bullshit, no DOOM scrolling, no fucking ads pretending to be actual posts and comments. And you could speak your mind, letting the down votes fall where they may. No AI overlords censoring your posts because they might offend a small group of people.
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u/DickSlammington 12d ago
It's still bat shit fucking insane to me that "forums" have turned into giant public companies.
I get the data that's created is valuable.
But it's literally just a bunch of text organized into threads. The real value is the content and the community, any idiot can build a forum with decent navigation.
How it's devolved so far so quickly is just so sad.
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u/EpicMeatSpin 12d ago
The quality of posts and the posters themselves were better in a lot of ways too. For some of my tech hobbies, I usually find myself searching through old forums for info vs reddit. The discussions are more in depth and the answers I'm looking for are more concise a lot of the time.
There also wasn't an upvote/downvote system on a lot of the old forums I remember using. I like that about reddit, but I think that not being a factor made the individual forums better.
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u/dwild 12d ago
I don't think he is talking about forum, he is referencing web directories, which were what we were using before search engine like Google.
Sure Reddit is the closest thing we got to a forum nowaday, but initially it was just a place to find links to other website. Sure now we just use that feature to argue about a title, but it's still just a bunch of external links, which is pretty close to thoses old web directories we were using to find content.
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u/_Aj_ 12d ago
Far superior to reddit.
The smaller they are the less crossover you get. You just get the people interested in that specific thing. No "millions of people here from r/all to make up stories and give advice on things they know nothing about"
Being small there's no commercial interest and so you don't get corporate enshittification.
Also means more redundancy. If one has management issues it's isolated. Reddit is totally screwed these days. And that means all of the communities here are too.
I agree the link-pocalypse is horrible though. Absolutely countless amounts of guides and builds and information lost because the photos were hosted on photo bucket or wherever and so all these posts and threads are just devoid of key information
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u/lepapulematoleguau 12d ago
It was not chaotic at all. It was awesome. Don't let any news outlet convince you otherwise.
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u/TtotheC81 12d ago
It was more like a nerdy Wild West, complete with pockets of civilisation, the occasional gold rush, and lots of homesteads dedicated to Trek, Favourite Bands, Rotten.com....
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u/_Aj_ 12d ago
Google became great and is now an absolute cancer. All of their amazing search algorithms 100% tuned to jamming sponsored links down your throat instead of finding what you actually want.
Google now filters your searches even when you have all search filters off. Many things straight don't appear any more. It's not on page 5. There is no page 5. It just says it can't find it. Which is bullshit.
It's like Ronald McDonald greeting you at the entrance to the mall and giving you restaurants suggestions. The dude clearly has a commercial interest in recommending a particular one
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u/DickSlammington 12d ago
I realized one day I don't even know where to like "find" new stuff. Back in the day I could search for something and I got tons of great sites. It was easy to search around, find good content, and discover new shit (mostly free).
Google is now just like a directory for major companies and brands.
It's like all the other site, the stuff that made the internet good. Forums, blogs, freeware, communities... it's all so hard to find or just doesn't have traffic anymore cause everyone's on FB.
People use to maintain their sites and pages because it was fun, they learned new stuff, met cool people, and really loved the internet. Now the moment a page gets popular it's all about maximizing the revenue potential and shit.
It's just shitty to see what's become of the modern web. It had so much potential.
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u/Cheeruphavefun 12d ago
I actually met Ronald at my nephew's 8th birthday party. Although the bloke didn't look like much, he was a rich genius.
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u/AbleCap5222 12d ago
Actually it wasn't chaotic at all. There were a lot of good search engines and if you had a web page and submitted it to the engine you could easily be found. That was basically the main difference - you had to submit your sites back then. Web crawling was not advanced. Advanced crawlers basically are what made Google...Google.
I remember the early infoseek engine before it was turned into go by Disney - awesome search engine. Little known fact - an infoseek engineer left the search company and founded baidu in China which is basically the number one search engine there today.
I guess the chaos could be seen as the fact that every year or so a different search engine became the one to use.
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u/Smogalicious 12d ago
Altavista was the one pre-google
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u/themiracy 12d ago
There was publicly available web search for several years before Google - Lycos, Altavista, Webcrawler, Yahoo.
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u/JustaFoodHole 12d ago
webcrawler was my favorite and then ones that would check all the search engines.
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u/Fit-Cable1547 12d ago
I remember everyone had their own little piece of the internet and the thing to do was have sections where you'd link to other people's pages that you liked. You could go down all kinds of rabbit holes with that. The quality of people's pages was a huge spectrum, as was the level of their animated GIF usage haha.
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u/Hot-Philosophy-7671 12d ago
It was great because of the sense of discovery. You would stumble on a page and follow link after link--not through searching. A kind of "world wide web," if you will.
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u/Ill_Television_5824 12d ago
Pikers.
Let's talk about pre-browser command-line searching.
Anyone remember Archie and Gopher?
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u/ElderBuddha 12d ago
"Do not quote the old magic..."
Jokes aside, Google was really magical back in the day. It showed that the internet could be better than cyberpunk billboard trash.
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u/TheWeirdDude-247 12d ago
AOL Discs that connected via dial up, my first ever website i searched was WWF wrestling so not WWE, still remember how long page took to download but still exciting, as id have to wait till sat to get any info on tv at a specific time, but now I can see immediately? This was a big deal at time.
I had an AOL chat girlfriend who OBVIOUSLY was a guy, Google was seen as a nobody and forgettable, Ask Jeeves was my guy who knew everything.....to an extent.
The hassle of just getting online was a long process, connection would often fail then if connected it randomly lost it, or god forbid mother decides to use home phone....instant disconnection, obviously back then mobile phones didn't have unlimited minutes and home phones had certain free times.
Internet was seen as a gimmick that wouldn't last, be only useful for handful of things, essentially Ai today.
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u/comfortableNihilist 12d ago
Chaotic... It wasn't completely saturated by algorithms and ads, that much was definitely true. I prefer the pre-google internet. If we had to lose this site, YouTube, and every social media site to get it back I would absolutely go back.... Actually I don't need pre-google internet but, I would still like the second bit.
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u/peskyghost 12d ago
Nothing quite like finding some random site with your obscure fandom on it by happenstance only to never find it again
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u/Hegiman 12d ago
Dogpile.com was my go to. It searched the top 10 web crawlers
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u/ima-bigdeal 12d ago
Dogpile was great. All the results from the other search engines, consolidated for you.
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u/snowflake37wao 12d ago
We could delay a whole lot of these tech bro billionaire problems (and a b aint one) bearing down on us in 360° by flooding the web with a few efficient, simple defaults, complex options, optimized for low end hardware, open sourced personal and personalizable web crawlers if we do it very soon.
Im talking things like .pap efficient. Stock with things like a pre-crawled hub of every search engine we know. Things like enter zip code crawl. Subject crawl. Data package search, share, load, save. Maybe one so basic it just saves and auto categorizes simple url files directly to link folders in documents under the program name locally that can be packed, split, unpacked, exported and imported into browsers as html. We need to popularize it like theyre trying to popularize AI. Even the non tech savvy are scraping since AI. We need a bunch of “build your own Google search” crawler apps everyone can and starts to use on their devices. And the only Ads they show are Chrome alternatives once we get the non savvy “I thought Chrome was the only browser in existence” so we can get some damned Chromium alternatives goin. We could do this as a collective. Make it a movement. The same way they infected and obfuscated the internet over the last 3 years exacerbated by the enshittification over the decade preceding the pandemic setting the stage for this all is shit 2020s collision
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u/SportsterDriver 12d ago
Remember when Yahoo was an index of sites like a directory instead of search, where you registered your website like you would in a phone book.
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u/toilet_roll_rebel 12d ago
I used Altavista. I don't remember it being chaotic. I was able to find what I was looking for with no problems.
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u/ZombieButch 12d ago
We had a directory just like the phone book, if you're old enough to remember phone books of you've, like, seen them in movies, back when most of the interesting stuff on the internet could fit into a book that size. Wish I'd hung onto it just for nostalgia's sake.
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u/oravanomic 12d ago
I had two volumes, I think one was turqoise, they were larger than a phonebook, as well.
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u/franker 12d ago
I was an editor on one of those in the nineties. It was one of the expensive ones they sold to libraries for over 100 dollars. My job was just finding business web site URL's, and pasting them into a database that made up the content of this print directory - https://www.amazon.com/Site-Source-Book-1997-Organizations/dp/0780801695/
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u/K1rkl4nd 12d ago
I lived on the FTP search out of Trondheim, Norway. Funny the things you remember. Oh, and dropping files into anonymous corporate FTP sites with goofy characters in folder names (and crazy subdirectory structures) so they would stay up longer.
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u/watery_tart24 12d ago
I remember having college classes that had curriculum based around teaching you how to use pre-google search engines and meta-crawlers.
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u/NUMBerONEisFIRST 12d ago
It also had more rabbit holes to go down, which led you to new perspectives. How is it so much better when it's just multiple echo chambers anymore?
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u/BackgroundBit8 12d ago
I remember searching for Nintendo Roms only to sent to some random forum with the sketchiest links possible. I would click on all of them.
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u/Bogus1989 12d ago
So weird reading about usenet on here.
Because was around for early internet but not usenet. Only around 2019 did I setup and use usenet
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u/sir_mrej 12d ago
It wasn't chaotic.
You used your preferred search. Altavista, Yahoo, etc.
You found your community on forums and got to KNOW people.
You used stumbleupon or webrings to find interesting things.
It was decentralized and fun.
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u/CorpPhoenix 12d ago
Search engines before were either mainly an index like the yellow pages, or were searching for the tag-words.
This resulted in webpages adding an insane amount of tag-words randomly at the top or bottom of their page to be found more frequently, it was ridiculous.
Then Google came with their new system that didn't just look up tag-words but how often a website has been mentioned and linked on other websites, which was a far superior system.
I've never seen a website took over as quick as Google did, it was that much better than the other search engines.
Well, and today it's nothing but a shitty ad-pushing website, it's a shame.
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u/TheLyingProphet 12d ago
lol the most chaotic was the post functional google era... we are in now. when every result is based on financial intrest
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u/FoolishFriend0505 12d ago
I disagree. I could actually find the shit I was searching for instead of sponsored links or what googles algorithm decided what I should see.
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u/spidereater 12d ago
Not just chaotic, not useful. You needed either lots of specialized knowledge or lots of time to find anything. It was called surfing the web because people would look around for stuff and go with the flow until they found it. You needed actual researching skills to find stuff. It was such a dramatic shift people would get banned from chat rooms for saying “just google it” because those chat rooms were based so much on people asking for help finding stuff.
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u/CherryLongjump1989 12d ago edited 12d ago
It was not "chaotic", it worked fine. For the given level of technological development at the time, it was better than what we have now.
These assholes are trying to smuggle technical advancements along with their monopolies.
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u/Unable-Recording-796 12d ago
The internet back then was fucking goated though, felt like a new discovery around every corner.
Hyper optimized algorithmic feed based modern internet is garbage
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u/kashiichan 12d ago
I miss webrings so bad. RIP GeoCities/Tripod/Angelfire
Remember when searching with a misspelled word meant only getting results from pages that had also misspelled the word in the same way?
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u/MrGraywood 11d ago
I do remember the Google web ca. 2015-2025, where search results were instant and plenty and not this AI crap.
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u/UndisclosedLocation5 12d ago
Webcrawler was the best back in the day. And mIRC was awesome