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Fun experiment - try finding something on the World Wide Web without using a search engine. It's not as impossible as you might think. But it's certainly not e
by bovermyer 7y ago
Fun experiment - try finding something on the World Wide Web without using a search engine.
It's not as impossible as you might think. But it's certainly not easy.
- jbritton 7y agoOut of curiosity I have no idea how to approach this. Are there indexes of websites available to the public that you are suggesting that can be searched via grep or some simple scripting? Or are you suggesting writing a web crawler to build our own index? Or are you suggesting finding curated links to sites?
- takeda 7y agoI miss the time when Internet was so small that a curated list was possible (Yahoo was priding itself to be biggest curated list[1]) [1] http://web.archive.org/web/19990208021747/http://yahoo.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/19990208021747/http://yahoo.com/
- ntsplnkv2 7y agoThere was a post a month or two ago that talked about the design of the Yahoo homepage back then, and looking at the link again, it's striking how much more pleasurable an experience it is.
- perl4ever 7y agoI still have a paperback book that claimed to be a comprehensive, not curated list of internet sites. It didn't even come with electronic media as became customary with computer books later on.
- bovermyer 7y agoThere are multiple ways that I know of to approach this problem, but part of the experiment is to explore for yourself.
- 101404 7y agoThere was the Open Directory Project. Then AOL bought it and killed it. This is the archived remains: https://www.dmoz-odp.org/ https://www.dmoz-odp.org/
- jaredsohn 7y agoJust open up the Internet Yellow Pages book. :) https://www.amazon.com/Internet-Yellow-Pages-6th-ed/dp/1562057847 https://www.amazon.com/Internet-Yellow-Pages-6th-ed/dp/15620... My family actually had a book like and I learned about a bunch of the net culture sites through it.
- blondin 7y agoi might be wrong but i didn't think OP was suggesting to re-index the web. that's a totally different beast from finding an answer to a question/problem or learning a new topic. depending on what i am looking for there are a few avenues i would explore if google wasn't available. github, gitlab, & stackoverflow/stackexchange for code related stuff. wikipedia for general topics. youtube for how-tos. twitter for the news. newsletters and podcasts for links to new articles. &c.
- techslave 7y agoyup. use gopher instead
- perl4ever 7y agoI've idly wondered what would happen if you made a search engine based on a custom crawler that only logged sites without any references to Google.
- maps7 7y agoDoes searching articles on wikipedia count?
- ehsankia 7y agoI would say that using a website's own internal search is fair game, but good luck trying to find, for example, the link to a blog you forgot the name to. You can try Wikipedia, Youtube, StackOverflow, WaPo's article, but I doubt you'll ever make your way to that blog without the URL to it.
- abruzzi 7y agoThe funny thing is I never book mark. Most of the sites I visit I just remember the URL. On rare occasions when I can’t remember the URL, I’ll search for in on Google. Like most people, I use Google a lot when I’m looking for things I don’t already know, but not when going to my commonly used sites. In the early 2000s I developed a website for a local public radio station. One thing it thought me was the usefulness of “speakable URLs”. Since most pages I built would require someone on the air speaking the url, they had to be short and distinctive, easy to say, and easy to remember (since the listener wouldn’t be taking notes, they had to remember it long enough to get to a computer and type it in). That got me in the habit of just remembering the URL, which I still do to this day.
- asjw 7y agoThat could be true to some extent, but the best information I've found on the internet since 1995 have been tematic forums. Still nowadays the best use of Google for me is to find those tematic forums And I must say search result quality has declined a lot over the years with the past 3 being worse of the sum of the past 20.
- agumonkey 7y agoI came on just around altavista/google so I don't remember, did people only use registries before ? or word of mouth ? must be weird to buy a domain name and still be mostly anonymous and invisible :)
- walshemj 7y agoBack in 93/94 you could quickly scan what's new on the internet on mosaic
- agumonkey 7y agoheh, that's true, the whole web graph could fit on a floppy
- rv-de 7y agoPrinted magazines recommending the best websites.
- chrisco255 7y agoWeb rings were common. If you visited a webpage on a particular topic, they would usually contain links to other related sites on a side bar. Dmoz was an old registry and I think Yahoo had a registry at one time as well.
- projektfu 7y agoAltavista was early. If you were on in 1996, that was only 5 years after the “birth” of the web. Before spiders, things were organized like Gopher. There were directories you could look up. Some pages kept archives of links. Web crawlers were introduced in 1993. At that point, gopher probably had more content. Remember WAIS? All the libraries liked that protocol. Encarta was still selling like hot cakes.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- dang 7y agoLooks like the OP domain itself is a version of that. https://www.superhighway98.com/ https://www.superhighway98.com/