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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The web used to be so small that Yahoo! had real humans doing the categorizing.
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
Yahoo Japan is actually a completely separate company.
Yahoo itself is still extremely popular in the US, just with a different demographic than we (the sort of people on the fediverse) regularly interact with. Their sports, finance, and news sites are some of the most popular on the internet. I don’t think it’s particularly relevant in the web search space these days though, and hasn’t been for a long time.
I think we don’t hear much about it because it has found a niche and is staying within it. It’s profitable, but not on an “infinite growth forever” trajectory so it rarely makes the news. Honestly kind of respectable.
My Nan was a faithful Yahoo user from her first WebTV right up to her death. I imagine she’d be exchanging all caps emails still if we’d buried her with a laptop.
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.
Indie Web Database
Pagans, queers, fandoms, mental illness communities, fans of purple… 10/10 exactly the sort of stuff that should be there
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.
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.
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.
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.
The peak was during the period you could say “If you search on Google for ___ you get ___.” Back when it was predictable. When they started personalizing results was the moment they sliced society’s brake lines.
I remember…I had a Windows 8.1 machine, I needed to SSH into a Raspberry Pi. No Powershell, no native SSH client, the easiest way to get one was to install PuTTY. So I googled “putty”. All lowercase, search engines sometimes get fucky when you start doing caps and punctuation, etc. I got an entire page of results for and about the TTY client, and nothing about drywall spackle or non-newtonian children’s toys. Because I often search for stuff like that, it made a bet and went all in.
The horrifying part of that is, that innocuous example makes it sound great. I didn’t have to overcome the “why did you name it that?” problem and refine the search by adding “tty client” or something like that. By getting to know me it took me to exactly what I wanted to find. When trying to find utility software, that’s okay. That’s not all people search the web for.
Now it’s hooked up to the “You’re right to call me out on that” machine, we’re sliding down the mountainside upside down on fire.
Yeah, I used to type “putty download”, click “I’m feeling lucky”, and go.
It worked 100% of the time. I wouldn’t try it these days, even if I needed putty.
Well how prominent will plumber’s putty or silly putty have the word Download on a page?
These day’s I’d be more worried that I’d be taken to some malware infested lookalike.
You wouldn’t download a silly putty.
Some things about the Internet back then really sucked. However, pre-SEO and AI bullshit Internet search was significantly superior to what we have now.
I remember when the first result was worth reading.
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.
I think it was better solely for the fact that you wouldn’t get ads in your search results
Plus zero LLM slop everywhere.
Well yeah, but that’s a recent development
There was about one legible link on Alta Vista for about 60 links of random garbage that would squawk and squeak and not infrequently freeze your computer.
I remember Google coming out and changing everything.
It had billions of pages instead of millions.
It returned results in seconds, and by seconds I mean 2-3, not 60.
Everything else became irrelevant overnight.
Now Google search is shit.
it’s not just google
for the past year or so I’ve been telling people that DDG is so much better as it actually returns the results you’re looking for, which Google stopped doing. except in the past few months, the same thing is happening there now too.
I don’t know if it’s fuckery with the search engines, people gaming SEO, ads, or if it’s just the sheer quantity of shit that’s on the internet now, but it’s at least half of the time now that I go to search something and it’s not in the top half dozen results. and sometimes I can’t even find it at all, despite knowing that it definitely exists out there.
DDG been shit for years. I went for it when their campaign was about not being in q bubble and getting unfiltered results. For yesrs everything that came back was hyper local. Search a name you get a doctor or history or spelling correction of someone in my town of 30,000 people or their ancestor. Turn off location puts something generic in top place and then everything else after as normal.
It’s the web in general. Pages that have been meticulously altered to score high on the latest search engines so they get the most visibility. I remember several times where the top results were obviously LLM generated text scraped from multiple other pages. Tons and tons of text with absolutely zero substance on the topic I was trying to learn about.
I switched to using Startpage as my search engine now. It works great. It feels like being transported back in time. It gets the results I want. Less websites full of AI generated fluff articles.
DDG has been shit for longer than a few months.
StartPage still gives me decent results, and my understanding is that it uses google somehow in the backend, so the capability is still there.
It’s (Google) just been polluted by all of the AI and personalized ad bullshit
It is, but in fairness all the sites doing SEO broke it just as much as their infinite chase for advertiser money.
And now AI is here to break it even further.
Billions of results and almost never anything relevant after the first page.
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
AltaVista’s advanced search (e.g. the NEAR statement) was extremely effective. Google was never as good even in its best days, nevermind now.
That’s overstating it. There’s a reason Google took over: it was better pretty much all around. The original Google algorithm was a really amazing tool for finding quality content on the web as it existed in those days. That was before SEO drove all these focused efforts on gaming the system.
With that said, Alta Vista definitely was the most promising tool before Google, and it had some potential if it hadn’t been so poorly managed by DEC. They simply saw it as a cool demo for their Alpha server platform, and never had any vision for it as a meaningful product on its own.
Sure, but it was the best tool for science/technology searches, in the hand of an expert user. I’m still salty all subsequent search engines were inferior in that respect.
Give it back. It will be fine. And since we’re asking, make Stumble Upon return from the dead.
Could this be what you’re looking for?
…google.com/…/ijaflnclbgjafchiipbgjlgiikbgfabd
It could. But I don’t use Chrome.
I remember when we were all trying to “learn the internet” still and Ask Jeeves was the search engine my school chose and we literally learned in class how to use search engines. I remember the decision of which search engine to use being very murky and changing a few times before they settled on Ask Jeeves
On a related note: every search engine under the sun now has AI built in EXCEPT the one called “Ask Jeeves”. If any of them should have been 100% AI, it was this one. And instead, it fucking died in the middle of all this.
Metacrawler FTW!
it was chaotic and it was awesome.
randomness of the early internet was a gift.
It isn’t a bad thing though, especially compared to what serching the internet has become.
God I miss surfing
Directories and Webrings
Bring back webrings.
Come join KSF! Surf is still very much alive there :D
Tell me more about KSF
KSF is the world standard for the surf mini game in Counter Strike. It is primarily played on Counter Strike Source and is completely free. They have a global leaderboard where you can compete in getting the fastest times on maps against everyone. It’s an incredibly welcoming and friendly community (in my experience). You can find out more about how to connect at their site here https://ksf.surf/ :)
I didn’t realize it was CS surf haha. That’s pretty cool.
I know that surfing can get pretty technical fast. Thanks for answering.
It was small. We had printed guides for websites!
There were search engine before Google.
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.)
At least I could finger people from a distance
I see you. Not enough people are going to get this one.
I’m getting so old
I feel ya. Pass the ibuprofen.
I was 11 in 1999 so the only thing I remember about the Internet from that period was porn and my cousin playing Quake with his friends in Pakistan. I barely remember what life was like before Google.
I miss website catalogues.
Bring back the web crawlers/spiders, you could find anything