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As I vaguely recall, from my own perceptions as web search was arriving: * There were a bunch of early "full-text"-ish search experiments, but Lycos best prove
by gojomo 8y ago
As I vaguely recall, from my own perceptions as web search was arriving:
* There were a bunch of early "full-text"-ish search experiments, but Lycos best proved its immense value and potential first.
* Then, AltaVista arrived with breadth & speed beyond what had previously been possible. Still, it required a bit of expertise to craft your queries.
* Then, Excite burst ahead with a quality breakthrough. Something about their use of HTML-styling & in-link text meant that even with fewer sites, the results were much better.
* Then, Hotbot (powered by Inktomi) had an era of best mix of fresh-content, deep-content, and quality ranking.
* Then, all those pioneers dropped the ball, in one way or another, letting Google out-rank, out-crawl, and out-business-model them. (And much of Google's business-model was pioneered by "Goto", later "Overture".) Sad, really, especially how many coulda-shoulda competitors eventually died inside Yahoo. (Including Overture.)
- dougb5 8y agoThis is right on. To add some color from my memory as a Lycos employee, it felt that many of the early search engines dropped by the ball in their rush become "portals". There was this mass delusion that it was important to hold the user's attention as long as possible in order to serve more ads--to own or otherwise control the content that users ultimately ended up at. Web search itself was seen as a commodity. This didn't seem so obviously wrong at the time. The Web was so much smaller.
- sytelus 8y agoI had say 2000 buble bursting also played part. It was easier to survive for a nimble startup and hard for behemoth with huge employee count and little revenues. I wonder if that didn’t happened then if we would have more competition in this space.