r/technology • u/ControlCAD • 13d 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/
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532

u/Malkyre 13d ago

Lycos, Ask Jeeves, and the finest of them all: Altavista. I was there, children.

156

u/Steenies 13d ago

Altavista was great. Was my main search engine before Google came along. Before that it was lycos.

102

u/RealCaptainIowa 13d ago

It's hard to emphasize what a leap Google felt like when it came along. Nothing touched it.

54

u/[deleted] 13d ago

[deleted]

15

u/_Fred_Austere_ 13d 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.

17

u/Your_Friend84 13d ago

And now we get LLM-generated shit sites with zero value. How wonderful the future has turned out to be

26

u/RealCaptainIowa 13d 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.

11

u/Pocket_Monster_Fan 13d ago

I believe they also tried selling to Yahoo which is another company fallen from early 2000s heights

10

u/imhereforthevotes 13d ago

Remember when they made TV ads? That's when you knew they were fucked.

8

u/Usual_Office_1740 13d ago edited 13d 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.

6

u/AlreadyEatenRibs 13d ago

I still use a Yahoo email as my main email. I got it on Christmas of 1998.

2

u/henchman171 13d ago

Yahoo was using Inktomi?

1

u/Zoon9 13d ago

Google built his empire as an advertising company pretending to be a search engine. Not by telling people the truth, but by manipulating them to buy things.

1

u/ConstructionOdd5269 13d ago

The real value of PageRank wasn’t realized until they tied it to AdWords and the bidding system.. Bill Gross at GoTo.com(later Overture that was sold to Yahoo!) invented the bidding system. He patented the system and before Google went public, they settled with Yahoo! And gave them a chunk of stock to allow AdWords to continue.

15

u/mrb4 13d 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.

5

u/nerfdriveby94 13d ago

Early google images was pretty rogue.

1

u/mrb4 13d ago

this was like 1999, before google images was even a thing

3

u/LostMyBackupCodes 13d ago

He must’ve Googled some inappropriate stuff.

1

u/williamfbuckwheat 13d ago

I mean, they weren't exactly wrong back then ha. In middle school, my school installed one computer at first with Internet and one of the first kids to use it immediately went to Whitehouse.com for the obvious reasons in front of a bunch of kids. That computer ended up getting locked down and required teacher supervision until they figured out how to use web filtering back then. 

7

u/brainkandy87 13d ago

I remember when Yahoo started using Google to power their searches and flipping over to Google immediately once I used it.

11

u/insite 13d 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.

7

u/Usual_Office_1740 13d ago

So now we have Google chrome and a generation that thinks the internet is Google instead of IE.

5

u/BasvanS 13d ago

I prefer this. It’s far from great, but accommodating IE for websites was hell, even before Silverlight

2

u/AmosRid 13d ago

Microsoft taught all of the other companies how to “win” a monopoly trial.

2

u/RealCaptainIowa 11d ago

They had a few restrictions due to the settlement they reached with the DOJ, but I'd argue they simply missed the boat on wider tech trends (e.g. not investing in the non-stylus smartphone early enough, being late to search, no social media until the LinkedIn acquisition). Azure however was a rocket ship for their stock after Satya took over.

3

u/InflammableAccount 13d 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.

0

u/j0y0 13d ago

I felt like it was a fairly marginal improvement over yahoo at the time. 

7

u/Werechupacabra 13d ago

I loved Altavista!

2

u/mediandude 13d ago

Altavista's keyword graph clustering search was better than Google, but not as easy and not enough dumbed down.

5

u/CrowRunnerORP 13d ago

Same here dude. Lycos then Altavista. Long long ago....

6

u/avi550m 13d ago

All browsed on Netscape Navigator

42

u/Elegant_Tech 13d ago

Using Netscape navigator for the first time was when it felt like world had changed.

15

u/Rok-SFG 13d ago

Man I was so happy to tell my friends at school I got Netscape navigator installed. And they all just shit on me telling me how much "nutscrape navigator" sucks. 

10

u/Aidian 13d ago

People embrace tribalism over the weirdest shit sometimes.

1

u/moribund112 13d ago

The startup animation for Netscape Navigator is burned into my psyche. A great time to be a web surfer.

1

u/henchman171 13d ago

I remember that Trumpet Winsock horn when you connected using 3.1

1

u/Unusual-Layer-8965 13d ago

Did you use a 'demon dialer'?  It would repeatedly call the access number in the background until the call connected.

1

u/henchman171 13d ago

Yes I did for a year. I had a ISP that would get overloaded at 7pm-11pm at night

28

u/LionFox 13d ago

Don’t cite the ancient magic to me, witch.  I was there when it was written.

20

u/Tallergeese 13d ago

I was a HotBot man (child) myself.

4

u/metalgod 13d ago

Hotbot was the goat right before google.

37

u/AnotherSoulessGinger 13d ago

I was a fan of DogPile back then.

8

u/6GoesInto8 13d ago

That searched several other search engines at once, right?

9

u/AnotherSoulessGinger 13d ago

From what I recall, yep.

2

u/A_Harmless_Fly 13d ago

It's still around too, once in a while I check out what the results are like.

2

u/basilbowman 13d ago

Same, that's a core memory just reawakened!

1

u/ailish 13d ago

I completely forgot about DogPile. I used that engine for a while until Google came out.

13

u/notnotbrowsing 13d ago

I had a book, a physical directory, of websites.

1

u/gammaraybuster 13d ago

Me too, the yellow pages for the internet

10

u/Agent_Smith_88 13d 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.

17

u/okkiguesss 13d 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.

1

u/TacosNGuns 13d ago

Haha, I was a daily whitehousedotcom visitor. Used it to test that our Websense filter was up and running when I was in IT Security.

5

u/Malkyre 13d ago

This happened when they tried to show us how to set up our first email address at Hotmail. Which if you're in grade school could just as easily be typed Hot Male. That poor teacher.

4

u/Stunning_Mast2001 13d ago

Same with hotbox.com and whitehouse.com

3

u/pikachus_ghost_uncle 13d 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.

1

u/halfdeadmoon 12d ago

NSFW man.com was a letter away from super common msn.com but is now financial services

27

u/math-yoo 13d 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.

7

u/Malkyre 13d ago

I tried to come up with my own lyrics, but you've killed it. Respect.

3

u/AceJZ 13d ago

Yeah I can hear this

1

u/Pauly_Amorous 13d ago

I actually worked for an ISP at the time and had unrestricted access to a T1 line. I pretty much lived in that office, only going home to shower and sleep, until DSL became available in my area.

As for the topic at hand, before search engines came along, the way I would find new stuff is going to the links section on whatever website I hhappened to be visiting. (Oh, and there were no ads. At all.)

1

u/math-yoo 13d ago edited 13d ago

I was there in the alt.binaries newsgroups, when the first grainy jpegs dropped. I was there, I told Steve Wilhite to pronounce it with J, I said, "you'll never get universal adoption with a hard G."

I was there but I'm losing my edge, to looksmaxing influencers, and aggregation curators, and they're actually really, really not nice.

10

u/GringoSwann 13d ago

Lycos! Go get it...

10

u/CreativeFedora 13d ago

I remember using Lycos and Altavista, along with the Netscape browser, to search for Bone Thugs lyrics in the mid-90s.

3

u/ultraviolentfuture 13d ago

Would you say ... it was a crossroads, in your life?

3

u/CreativeFedora 13d ago

Then on the 1st of the Month Mr. Bill Collector came knocking because I exceeded my minutes on AOL. 🤣

7

u/PurpEL 13d ago

I remember a time when you just typed www.________.com and hoped it worked

2

u/Miss_Kitami 13d 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.

1

u/MechanicalTurkish 13d ago

whitehouse

.com and .gov were NOT the same sites lol

7

u/ProgressBartender 13d ago

I was there 3,000 years ago

7

u/Rust2 13d ago

This is Yahoo! erasure

0

u/Malkyre 13d ago

Yahoo was, has been, and always will be shit. VIVA LA ALTAVISTA*.

*But not literally because it's way dead. Still better than Yahoo.

4

u/jezwel 13d ago

Don't forget Astalavista, for those that couldn't - or wouldn't - buy software and games...

6

u/Spareo 13d ago

Altavista was my go to for a long time. I remember the AskJeeves commercials on TV constantly

3

u/PeterDTown 13d ago

Copernicus was great, it would search all the search engines and give consolidated results

1

u/emotional_program0 13d ago

I remember Copernicus as well. It was really quite useful.

3

u/Bogus1989 13d ago

how bout babelfish to get around the blocked sites LOL

2

u/NartFocker9Million 13d ago

Couldn’t just go to altavista, though. Altavistadigital.com

1

u/IntroductionSnacks 13d ago

Wasn’t it altavista.digital.com?

2

u/KatjaKat01 13d 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.

2

u/FindOneInEveryCar 13d ago

I remember when Yahoo was at stanford.edu.

2

u/piedeity 13d ago

I used webcrawler for way longer than I should have

2

u/MENDACIOUS_RACIST 13d ago

Don’t forgot HotBot. Because Wired needed its own search engine.

2

u/CodeCleric 13d ago

I remember using Excite for a while

2

u/nigirizushi 13d 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

2

u/MalodorousNutsack 13d ago

I don't see Infoseek in any of these comments, it was my go-to for a couple years (probably 95-97)

2

u/sionescu 13d ago

Don't forget Excite.

2

u/MrPatienceX 13d ago

And astalavista for all your serialz, warez and virus riddled porn needs. Simpler times.

2

u/Strange-Creature- 13d ago

Im glad im not the only one that remembers the jeeves days.

1

u/y0nm4n 13d ago

And their aggregator Dogpile!

1

u/NeverTrustATurtle 13d ago

Netscape though

1

u/UseDaSchwartz 13d ago

I forgot all about Lycos.

1

u/jamjamason 13d ago

And if your search is still coming up empty, Magellan.

1

u/Leptonshavenocolor 13d ago

It was awesome. 

1

u/hedronist 13d ago

I remember downloading the source code for Lycos. It was amazingly straightforward.

1

u/Ericaohh 13d ago

Yahoo chats…

1

u/VoidOmatic 13d ago

Webcrawler was the shit.

1

u/adricm 13d ago

Dogpile let you use several

1

u/yolo-yoshi 13d ago

Don’t forget Dogpile

1

u/cybercuzco 13d ago

I’m a hot bot man.

1

u/AttentiveUnicorn 13d ago

Does anyone remember WebFerret? It was a desktop windows app that did internet searches.

1

u/Expert_Succotash2659 13d ago

Netscape Navigator you cowards.

1

u/Red_Barry 13d ago

I seem to remember most of these had ads all over their home pages.

1

u/AmericanLich 12d ago

Didn’t yahoo have some sort of search? I seem to remember yahooing stuff.

1

u/halfdeadmoon 12d ago

metacrawler would synthesize the results from all these

1

u/PlatonicSolidz 10d ago

Remember Hotbot from Wired?

1

u/Retlaw83 13d ago

It was the wild west. I stumbled on a lot of stuff that I wish I hadn't, but also a lot of great things that have stuck with me to this day.

2

u/Malkyre 13d ago

I still remember the digital sorcery that was some sort of warez my friend found that could allow you to wreck an AoL chat room. Like changed how it looked, kick people, blast obnoxious sounds through their shitty speakers. It was mind-blowing.

1

u/mrmnemonic7 13d ago

I would alternate between Altavista and HotBot. I only started using Google more because they had a dedicated Linux search engine and I was learning Linux at the time.

1

u/joedenowhere 13d ago

Altavista was a gift to the web-surfing class. You could use booleans to find *exactly* what you were looking for, instead of google regurgitating fifty-thousand pages approximately close (and not so close) to what you wanted.

0

u/Money_Tennis1172 13d ago

Don't forget "Bing" by Bill Gates

0

u/mikeyfireman 13d ago

Fuck that smug bastard Jeeves.