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.
Open discovery is a hard problem.
If that seems pseudo-science speak to seem smart, I mean that you need some prior trust. Just like with PGP. Some axioms. In year 2002 those axioms were people you meet IRL and links you saw printed. Now these have been erased as a Web discovery mechanism, so to not compete with search engines and platforms. Links are login-walled and short-living most of the time. People are discouraged from making their own pages and sharing links.
My Kademlia experiment is more working than not, slowly moving to split core and UI there, to have replaceable cores. Want to try F2F. Especially since it even looks more like something that would work F2F way better. I’ve learned that I’m not as smart as I think while making it. Still don’t have anything resembling indirect reputation, but eventually I want to make that, for some kind of “public” media, where you need to filter the sewer stream.
(No, I won’t share, it’s a P2P program written in TCL/Tk, entirely, not just UI, except for some bindings in C that weren’t done by someone else. It seemed easier to start with, with asynchronous style being very easy there, but I’ve recently tried writing some other thing in Python and realized just how easier and faster Python is due to everything not being a string, however boring that critique of TCL would seem.)
There were search engine before Google.
I had a list of websites to visit that I kept on a notebook because the only internet I had available was at a cybercafé
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.
Any information was available but its veracity was always questioned. And this was before Wikipedia too so the only reliable sources were Encarta and Britannica unless you had a very cutting edge library.
The web used to be so small that Yahoo! had real humans doing the categorizing.
A few years ago while cleaning out my late grandmother’s house, I found a physical book which was just a listing and description of various websites.
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
Webrings are still a thing. I see them from time to time.
I can’t remember the last time I did. Have one in mind?
Here is a whole directory of them as a starter. Many retro pages from this directory but many sites are active and get regular updates.
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.
Ive heard it still has a titan presence in Japan though
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.
Oh yeah that was good.
Metacrawler FTW!
