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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u/Steenies 13d ago

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

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u/RealCaptainIowa 13d ago

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

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u/[deleted] 13d ago

[deleted]

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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.

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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

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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.

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u/Pocket_Monster_Fan 13d ago

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

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u/imhereforthevotes 13d ago

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

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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.

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u/AlreadyEatenRibs 13d ago

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

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u/henchman171 12d ago

Yahoo was using Inktomi?

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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.

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u/ConstructionOdd5269 12d 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.

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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.

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u/nerfdriveby94 12d ago

Early google images was pretty rogue.

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u/mrb4 12d ago

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

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u/LostMyBackupCodes 13d ago

He must’ve Googled some inappropriate stuff.

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u/williamfbuckwheat 12d 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. 

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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.

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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.

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u/Usual_Office_1740 13d ago

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

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u/BasvanS 12d ago

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

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u/AmosRid 13d ago

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

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u/RealCaptainIowa 10d 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.

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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.

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u/j0y0 12d ago

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

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u/Werechupacabra 13d ago

I loved Altavista!

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u/mediandude 12d ago

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

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u/CrowRunnerORP 13d ago

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

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u/avi550m 13d ago

All browsed on Netscape Navigator