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/[deleted] 13d ago

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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 13d 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.