12 ms·

I think you are leaving out a really important aspect of the early internet- content discovery was really hard for users. If you were looking for something abou

I think you are leaving out a really important aspect of the early internet- content discovery was really hard for users. If you were looking for something about Pets until google became dominant, you were just as likely, if not more likely, to type pets.com into your browser as you were to go to a search engine. Getting the initial traffic to your site was really hard in those days, the domain was really important for that.

oarsinsync 6y ago
To that end, it's worth reading up on the history of sex.com. The domain historically (and currently?) generates tonnes of revenue through advertising, and has been hijacked more than once.
- TMWNN 6y ago
  I wonder if it's because people are likely to try `sex.com` in a web browser for laughs (and get surprised when it turns out to be a real site), but aren't likely to do so with `books.com` or `travel.com`.
  - toyg 6y ago
    You have too much trust in people's wholesomeness. We all know the internet is for pr0n ("...so grab your d##k and double-click...").
  - Quarrelsome 6y ago
    there used to be (sadly not anymore) a very active forum on fuckyou.com and it was mostly populated by people that had just randomly typed it in one day.
  - codezero 6y ago
    This is somewhat second hand but I worked with someone who claimed to know the person who owned sex.com (he was trying to buy it from him at the time, and I'm trying to be deliberately un-assertive) in the mid 90s (also fair warning, this was a long time ago and I probably misremember stuff) and said he paid a ton of money in bribes to the search engines/portals back then - which was what most people assumed, but those companies insisted wasn't true, so it fit a narrative people liked. I don't think sex.com was an expected direct hit back then - and if I'm remembering correctly, even in the later 90s, you would have had to type http://www.sex.com http://www.sex.com to get it to even load right - there wasn't a ton of convenience and most browsers relied on a heavy set of built-in bookmarks to get people into portals and search engines. That said, I believe it was totally true that they likely paid six or seven figures for a year or longer deal to guarantee top three for a ton of porn search terms. I assume that area was allowed to be seedy in order to mitigate risk of even allowing that content to be included in the first place, and companies didn't feel bad getting money from porn sites who had a lot to throw around.
    - codezero 6y ago
      Should add that as I understood it the business model was that sex.com resold front page space to affiliates that were relevant to the search terms that led to their paid listing being listed higher for a particular keyword. That’s how they could afford to bribe/partner with portals/search engines pre-Google. For context, squatters would often land you on some bad sites and URI syntax was unforgiving, so it just isn’t something I remember most doing. There was a general desire for simple branding on the off chance you can get it typed in or printed on a business card or in an ad, but it was not the common entry point. Also of note: UX expectations back then didn’t trust typing into a box and seeing any result first - it really was the solid ranking of Google results that made that UX something browser vendors adopted or more cynically, that Google pushed first with partnerships then with ownership of Chrome.
      - hnlmorg 6y ago
        Pre-2000 porn was a wild ride. You were never more that 1 click away from crashing your computer under the weight of a hundred pop ups!
        codezero 6y ago
        And the implicit threat of your bank “outing” you via the transaction if you try to cancel. I may be misremembering but I felt like there was a good chance what I was viewing legally may end up suddenly illegal with the way online legislation was going in the late 90s, and I’m talking just like laughably soft core stuff by comparison to today, and that permeated the online porn business and kept it seedy for a long time.
        dialamac 6y ago
        No idea what you’re talking about. There was the run up to the communications decency act and obscenity prosecutions but these were far more risky for the peddlers, not the consumers (and some were prosecuted). There was the old hilarious CP80 initiative by the Mormons (with a nice tie-in to the SCO v Linux debacle) but that never had any serious legs to stand on. Meanwhile discreet billing for naughtiness predates the internet and was especially notable in the days of 900 numbers - assuring discretion was pretty well stated. Considering that child porn was essentially legal and you could walk into adult stores in broad daylight on Times Square not too long ago I think you are misremembering things or probably too young for context. What changed is the cultural mainstream acceptance.. that something like PornHub can be a mainstream company. The market itself was alive and well pretty much the day after the movie camera left Menlo Park.
  - Mauricebranagh 6y ago
    Back in the early days 94/95 people quite often used to type single word domains just to see what was out there. This is back when you could fire up mosaic and read the what's new on the internet today :-)
    - Communitivity 6y ago
      I remember being on Tymnet and just trying addresses via a program to see if I found anything. Most interesting thing I found was a Fed Reserve address once (did not do anything with that).
      - Mauricebranagh 6y ago
        I used to work for Tymnet the TEC in the UK :-) People used to do that on the x.25 network to find interesting sites.
snowwrestler 6y ago
Early search engines were pretty dumb and heavily weighted on keywords, which a generic domain name helped with as well. Again, less of an issue now with more intelligent search engines. (Although strong brands still tend to a get a lot of traffic via searches on their name...)
- avereveard 6y ago
  early on you went to directories
  - kls 6y ago
    And if you did not you where usually only 3 links away from Goatse.cx .
drzaiusapelord 6y ago
I remember that era pretty fondly and I don't ever recall just typing in random URLs, except maybe jokey ones like sex.com or fuck.com for kicks. We had Yahoo's search engine at the time and worked well enough. And to a lesser extent Lycos/Hotbot/Inktomi/DMOZ. The pre-Google web was pretty interesting and a bit more sophisticated than gets credit today. I also feel you were less likely to discover retailers on the web randomly. You'd more than likely hear about them first on the news or from friends and go from there. I don't think it was common to just discover some random e-tailer like we do today, put in our credit card, and expect the package in a couple days. You learned about Amazon from 60 minutes or your friend who subscribed to Wired magazine or the guy at the software store, not from a search engine. I think the whole pets.com and travel.com is just the usual marketing logic at work and not really related to the limitation of search engines. Its just shady marketing tricks, a bit like how we see the .biz and other gimmicky tlds today.
- devlopr 6y ago
  It was really common to type in random words as domains expecting something. People would make mistakes so people would buy domains with common spelling mistakes.
  - toyg 6y ago
    Browsers also tried to autocomplete <word> as www.<word>.com (and .net and .org, iirc) and send you there if it resolved. At some point they switched to sending you to search engines instead, but i bet there are flags somewhere in Firefox' bowels that will still do that for you if you really want.
    - kindall 6y ago
      Or you just hit Ctrl-Enter
  - mortenjorck 6y ago
    I have a random memory of the website at hanson.com having a banner alerting visitors that the website of the popular late-90s boy band was in fact at hansonline.com, and that you would only find information about guitars made by the Hanson company should you further browse the site at which you currently found yourself. Curiously, that domain now redirects to some concrete company, Hanson guitars existing instead at hanson-guitars.com.
taeric 6y ago
This begs the question of if things are better today. For shopping, is it?
- paxys 6y ago
  Absolutely. If you know what you want to buy, it takes seconds to find the absolute cheapest place on the internet to buy it. Then it's up to you to decide whether you trust the site or not. Brand name helps with perception, but definitely not discovery.
  - TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
    > Brand name helps with perception That used to be true with Amazon. Not anymore, not for me. Now I have to decide if I trust and endless array of 3rd party sellers. It is often just easier to buy from a manufacturer’s website since I know I’m getting the real thing and it’s not expired or otherwise screwed up. Maybe I pay a few more bucks, but I’m ok with that for a lot of things. (Exception: books and used)
    - datavirtue 6y ago
      Yeah. Direct retail is booming and so are established small specialty bricks and mortar distribution and retail. I spent $5k last month on clayking.com. They have a central location and drop-ship a lot of stuff that manufacturers aren't direct selling, yet. Same thing over at theceramicshop.com and Bailey pottery.com. They are all slammed and taking quite a while to fill orders...manufacturers included.
    - gambiting 6y ago
      It's always interesting to me how people on HN almost universally have such poor experiences with Amazon. I've had over 200(!!!) orders from Amazon last year alone and didn't have any problems with any order. In fact when my guaranteed next day delivery was late by a day they just gave me a month of prime for free. And every time I decide to buy directly from the manufacturer I get punished - bought a Lenovo laptop around September, laptop turned up with a broken screen. Took over 3 weeks to get Lenovo UK to replace it and it was an exercise in absolute frustration, I could write a small essay about it. I was so upset at myself for not buying it from Amazon - I know if I did and had the same problem I would literally have a replacement posted to me the following day without having to fill out a dozen forms and spend hours on the phone with customer support.
u801e 6y ago
> the early internet- content discovery was really hard for users. It wasn't as good as google is now, but search engines of the time did allow for discovery.
- iorrus 6y ago
  I thought it was much better back then, you could find niche sites that were of interest. Google seems to have banned all the interesting wild content that made the internet so fascinating in its early days. Blogs seem to have disappeared completely for instance and I have to specify the site to search to find anything e.g. site:Reddit.com However it does have an amazing ability to find comments on stackoverflow relevant to my needs based on a few keywords.
asdefghyk 6y ago
In about 1994 I recall the aim was to find a good page of links to whatever topic interested a person.
- VBprogrammer 6y ago
  Oh yeah, I remember discovering some great content from pages like that back in the day. I also vaguely remember the idea of content rings being a thing.
WaitWaitWha 6y ago
Hmmm... That is not how I remember it. I could gopher topics by early 90's, and Infoseek, Yahoo, WebCrawler, etc. were a full text search of pages by mid 90's. I distinctly recall searching usenet across multiple servers. Even before this, when data only flowed through uucp (or Fido), search was albeit queued, readily available. Your mileage may have varied; i just want to be clear that it was not that it did not exist, but new-comers would have a steeper learning curve. Today, it is expected, nay, demanded as a human right to be able to search the entire internet from a uniform and single klick search box. (yes, old crotchety, "in my day..." :) ) (edit: misspelurating stuffage)
- Retric 6y ago
  Yes, the earliest directories / search engines worked extremely well in large part because there minimal content. When there where 7 knitting websites they don’t need to worry about SEO. It was only after the users started getting hundreds of results for most searches that search engines needed to worry about filtering and prioritization.
  - pmiller2 6y ago
    Here's a great example of why search engines started using more sophisticated examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_Google_bombs_in_the_2004_U.S._Presidential_election#Bombing_of_George_W._Bush https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_Google_bombs_in_the_... People started to understand how PageRank worked, and managed to get George W. Bush's official biography page at whitehouse.gov to the top of the search for "miserable failure." As I recall, this worked until at least 2008, maybe a couple years past that.
    - pmiller2 6y ago
      Whoops. s/examples/algorithms/
- usefulcat 6y ago
  The fact that you had even heard of gopher would have put you in a very small minority of internet users once dial-up internet access become relatively accessible (so, post-1995ish or so).
vishnugupta 6y ago
I can totally second this as someone who began surfing web in 1997 as a university student. Content discovery was next to non-existent. You had these directories like Y! or Lycos which more or less mirrored yellow pages. My group of friends would exchange interesting site links over e-mail, floppy disk or the good old way, write them down in a note book. Before you ask, internet surfing was only available in expensive public kiosks so browser book marks weren't of much use. Only when I got my own PC + internet in 2000 did I began using browser bookmarks. And then Google became popular around 2002 just when I entered post-graduation and changed web surfing forever.
- janlaureys 6y ago
  This brought back a long lost memory of when before we had internet at home. My dad took me to an internet cafe and I had printed a whole list beforehand of sites I wanted to visit. I had just guessed a bunch of random domain names based on my interests and things I thought would have a cool website. Stuff like porshe.com, titanic.com, mountainbiking.com, spaceshuttle.com.
- hnlmorg 6y ago
  People were commonly using Lycos and Yahoo as search engines by 1997. Sure, some of the more exciting content wasn’t stuff you’d think to search for and thus would often get shared via word of mouth (like the “Bert is evil” site that parodied the Sesame Street character in compromising photos...after all, which sane persons would search “Bert +hitler” ?) I think the limited time many people had on the internet (as you said, in some instances at Internet kiosks where you’d be limited to an hour at a time. Or on expensive dial up) probably contributed to people curating and sharing links offline between friends. But I do remember using search engines in that era specifically because AltaVista was widely regarded between myself and my peers to be the best search engine in terms of keyword syntax and the accuracy of the results. Remember this was the era before search engines popularised entering in natural language as a search query. Ask Jeeves (later renamed to just “Ask”) was actually the first to popularise that and even that was pre-2000 (it also largely sucked compared to keyword driven queries but I guess the tech wasn’t quiet there yet). I think it was 1999 when my friends and I first discovered Google. Back then Google was keyword query based too. The natural language side of Google came much later (mid-2000s at a guess). But what sold Google was its minimalist home page and the accuracy of its results. The minimalist home page was novel because search engines were considered internet portals before Google. Yahoo! Would have online games, chat rooms, site recommendations and email all accessible from its landing page and it was a similar story for many of the other search engines as well. They considered themselves the homepage of the internet (and in many ways they were right). Whereas Google went the opposite way and said “let’s strip as much guff from our landing page as possible” and is modem uses really welcomed that (plus the accuracy of its results too). It’s ironic just how heavy Google’s landing page has become. By 2000 the web had already felt like it had shifted from its adolescent years of anything goes and was starting to grow up. The stigma of meeting strangers online was fading and businesses were adopting the web as more than just a niche marketing tool - in part helped by Online payments becoming a thing with PayPal, WorldPay etc.
eloisant 6y ago
This, also search engines used to give a lot of weight to workds in domains so if you searched for "book", the search engine was likely to give you books.com as first result.
iso1631 6y ago
If you weren't in yahoo you weren't online On the other hand if you were in yahoo you were online. Type "books" into yahoo though and you'd be more likely to find books.com than amazon.com as the top page, and clearly "books.com" would sell books, who knows what "amazon.com" sells, something about Brazilian rivers?
jonathanstrange 6y ago
I used AltaVista and Hotbot all the time, as well as other search engines and curated pages, and there was no problem finding things. I believe most people used search engines and aggregation pages since entering the address in the browser bar would simply yield an error if you entered it wrong. Connecting the address bar to a search engine is fairly recent and was disputed a lot. Google did nothing particularly innovative or new, they just had the cleanest interface, their page was fast, and provided good results. That's what made them successful. Edit: On a side note, I feel really old now. :(
- rusk 6y ago
  Google had the best results by far. I remember around 2000 most “regular people” had pretty much given up on the web. It was google and maybe Napster that got people interested again... I wonder what it’ll be to fix the Internet this time around?
- mathewsanders 6y ago
  I also used Altavista and Hotbot (although I don’t remember why I could choose one over the other for a certain search). I do remember one point of difference was Google’s “I’m feeling lucky” option that just sent you to the first search result. I really liked that feature, but I’m guessing was removed in favor of growing impressions and ad revenues.
- iorrus 6y ago
  Exactly, the single feature that made me use google over yahoo/altavista was the clean interface, I was using dial up back then and it loaded very quickly the others were covered in ads.
- autokad 6y ago
  Altvista's edge over the competition at the time was that it indexed the most content. But google came in with pagerank and had superior results. There was a 3 year span or so where people just attributed google's success to minimalism. in terms of minimalism, hotbot was a disaster, but it was the algorithm that truly set google apart. minimalism has its good points, but falsely attributing it to google's success probably focused too much attention to it in the internet of the 2010s.
Zsolt 6y ago
The first time I had the chance to use the internet I typed in "whitehouse", hit enter and whitehouse.com loaded. It turned out to be a porn site, the teacher saw and I got banned from using the internet - in 40 seconds.
- jdironman 6y ago
  White House was the first time I ever seen porn / naked women. Cue me spending the next 6 months sneaking to load the page on dialup all hours of the day. To be a kind again. Now we have TBs of data but tend to be uncontent sometimes.
  - rusk 6y ago
    Anybody ever type alta-vista.com by mistake? The search engine had no hyphen, this address went to something else ...
    - jdwithit 6y ago
      Heh, was about to post this one myself. My buddy got in big trouble in the high school computer lab making this typo. I wonder what percentage of domains in the late 90's were simply "adult" sites trying to capture traffic via typos. It certainly felt like a lot.
      - jstarfish 6y ago
        Then there was expertsexchange.com, which was always bound to disappoint one of two demographics.
        nezgar 6y ago
        Heh, like the msexchange manager icon on your microsoft exchange server... :D
- 11235813213455 6y ago
  what search engine was the culprit?
NDizzle 6y ago
The early internet, for me, was a 1-800 number BBS called Starfire. It had a splash page to the “internet” section that I’d assume was curated by the operator. This was probably 94 and 95.
syshum 6y ago
In some ways content was more discoverable back then. There was less of it, and it was objectively harder to get it online thus making the quality higher for the stuff that was there. Plus Web Directories, and Link lists where IMO better than keyword searches. They allowed you to find and follow topics faster. The explosion of content and google has made discovery harder unless you are one of the Top sites or platforms. All it takes it being on one of them, not being a good quality content. Want to sell a widget, you better sell it through amazon because chances are Google is going to index those results as the Top Results not your webstore. Even manufacturers that want to sell direct have to also have Amazon stores because the Amazon listing is the one of the only ways to get a top search spot

oarsinsync 6y ago

To that end, it's worth reading up on the history of sex.com. The domain historically (and currently?) generates tonnes of revenue through advertising, and has been hijacked more than once.

TMWNN 6y ago
I wonder if it's because people are likely to try `sex.com` in a web browser for laughs (and get surprised when it turns out to be a real site), but aren't likely to do so with `books.com` or `travel.com`.
- toyg 6y ago
  You have too much trust in people's wholesomeness. We all know the internet is for pr0n ("...so grab your d##k and double-click...").
- Quarrelsome 6y ago
  there used to be (sadly not anymore) a very active forum on fuckyou.com and it was mostly populated by people that had just randomly typed it in one day.
- codezero 6y ago
  This is somewhat second hand but I worked with someone who claimed to know the person who owned sex.com (he was trying to buy it from him at the time, and I'm trying to be deliberately un-assertive) in the mid 90s (also fair warning, this was a long time ago and I probably misremember stuff) and said he paid a ton of money in bribes to the search engines/portals back then - which was what most people assumed, but those companies insisted wasn't true, so it fit a narrative people liked. I don't think sex.com was an expected direct hit back then - and if I'm remembering correctly, even in the later 90s, you would have had to type http://www.sex.com http://www.sex.com to get it to even load right - there wasn't a ton of convenience and most browsers relied on a heavy set of built-in bookmarks to get people into portals and search engines. That said, I believe it was totally true that they likely paid six or seven figures for a year or longer deal to guarantee top three for a ton of porn search terms. I assume that area was allowed to be seedy in order to mitigate risk of even allowing that content to be included in the first place, and companies didn't feel bad getting money from porn sites who had a lot to throw around.
  - codezero 6y ago
    Should add that as I understood it the business model was that sex.com resold front page space to affiliates that were relevant to the search terms that led to their paid listing being listed higher for a particular keyword. That’s how they could afford to bribe/partner with portals/search engines pre-Google. For context, squatters would often land you on some bad sites and URI syntax was unforgiving, so it just isn’t something I remember most doing. There was a general desire for simple branding on the off chance you can get it typed in or printed on a business card or in an ad, but it was not the common entry point. Also of note: UX expectations back then didn’t trust typing into a box and seeing any result first - it really was the solid ranking of Google results that made that UX something browser vendors adopted or more cynically, that Google pushed first with partnerships then with ownership of Chrome.
    - hnlmorg 6y ago
      Pre-2000 porn was a wild ride. You were never more that 1 click away from crashing your computer under the weight of a hundred pop ups!
      - codezero 6y ago
        And the implicit threat of your bank “outing” you via the transaction if you try to cancel. I may be misremembering but I felt like there was a good chance what I was viewing legally may end up suddenly illegal with the way online legislation was going in the late 90s, and I’m talking just like laughably soft core stuff by comparison to today, and that permeated the online porn business and kept it seedy for a long time.
        dialamac 6y ago
        No idea what you’re talking about. There was the run up to the communications decency act and obscenity prosecutions but these were far more risky for the peddlers, not the consumers (and some were prosecuted). There was the old hilarious CP80 initiative by the Mormons (with a nice tie-in to the SCO v Linux debacle) but that never had any serious legs to stand on. Meanwhile discreet billing for naughtiness predates the internet and was especially notable in the days of 900 numbers - assuring discretion was pretty well stated. Considering that child porn was essentially legal and you could walk into adult stores in broad daylight on Times Square not too long ago I think you are misremembering things or probably too young for context. What changed is the cultural mainstream acceptance.. that something like PornHub can be a mainstream company. The market itself was alive and well pretty much the day after the movie camera left Menlo Park.
- Mauricebranagh 6y ago
  Back in the early days 94/95 people quite often used to type single word domains just to see what was out there. This is back when you could fire up mosaic and read the what's new on the internet today :-)
  - Communitivity 6y ago
    I remember being on Tymnet and just trying addresses via a program to see if I found anything. Most interesting thing I found was a Fed Reserve address once (did not do anything with that).
    - Mauricebranagh 6y ago
      I used to work for Tymnet the TEC in the UK :-) People used to do that on the x.25 network to find interesting sites.

snowwrestler 6y ago

Early search engines were pretty dumb and heavily weighted on keywords, which a generic domain name helped with as well. Again, less of an issue now with more intelligent search engines. (Although strong brands still tend to a get a lot of traffic via searches on their name...)

avereveard 6y ago
early on you went to directories
- kls 6y ago
  And if you did not you where usually only 3 links away from Goatse.cx .

drzaiusapelord 6y ago

I remember that era pretty fondly and I don't ever recall just typing in random URLs, except maybe jokey ones like sex.com or fuck.com for kicks. We had Yahoo's search engine at the time and worked well enough. And to a lesser extent Lycos/Hotbot/Inktomi/DMOZ. The pre-Google web was pretty interesting and a bit more sophisticated than gets credit today. I also feel you were less likely to discover retailers on the web randomly. You'd more than likely hear about them first on the news or from friends and go from there. I don't think it was common to just discover some random e-tailer like we do today, put in our credit card, and expect the package in a couple days. You learned about Amazon from 60 minutes or your friend who subscribed to Wired magazine or the guy at the software store, not from a search engine. I think the whole pets.com and travel.com is just the usual marketing logic at work and not really related to the limitation of search engines. Its just shady marketing tricks, a bit like how we see the .biz and other gimmicky tlds today.

devlopr 6y ago
It was really common to type in random words as domains expecting something. People would make mistakes so people would buy domains with common spelling mistakes.
- toyg 6y ago
  Browsers also tried to autocomplete <word> as www.<word>.com (and .net and .org, iirc) and send you there if it resolved. At some point they switched to sending you to search engines instead, but i bet there are flags somewhere in Firefox' bowels that will still do that for you if you really want.
  - kindall 6y ago
    Or you just hit Ctrl-Enter
- mortenjorck 6y ago
  I have a random memory of the website at hanson.com having a banner alerting visitors that the website of the popular late-90s boy band was in fact at hansonline.com, and that you would only find information about guitars made by the Hanson company should you further browse the site at which you currently found yourself. Curiously, that domain now redirects to some concrete company, Hanson guitars existing instead at hanson-guitars.com.

taeric 6y ago

This begs the question of if things are better today. For shopping, is it?

paxys 6y ago
Absolutely. If you know what you want to buy, it takes seconds to find the absolute cheapest place on the internet to buy it. Then it's up to you to decide whether you trust the site or not. Brand name helps with perception, but definitely not discovery.
- TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
  > Brand name helps with perception That used to be true with Amazon. Not anymore, not for me. Now I have to decide if I trust and endless array of 3rd party sellers. It is often just easier to buy from a manufacturer’s website since I know I’m getting the real thing and it’s not expired or otherwise screwed up. Maybe I pay a few more bucks, but I’m ok with that for a lot of things. (Exception: books and used)
  - datavirtue 6y ago
    Yeah. Direct retail is booming and so are established small specialty bricks and mortar distribution and retail. I spent $5k last month on clayking.com. They have a central location and drop-ship a lot of stuff that manufacturers aren't direct selling, yet. Same thing over at theceramicshop.com and Bailey pottery.com. They are all slammed and taking quite a while to fill orders...manufacturers included.
  - gambiting 6y ago
    It's always interesting to me how people on HN almost universally have such poor experiences with Amazon. I've had over 200(!!!) orders from Amazon last year alone and didn't have any problems with any order. In fact when my guaranteed next day delivery was late by a day they just gave me a month of prime for free. And every time I decide to buy directly from the manufacturer I get punished - bought a Lenovo laptop around September, laptop turned up with a broken screen. Took over 3 weeks to get Lenovo UK to replace it and it was an exercise in absolute frustration, I could write a small essay about it. I was so upset at myself for not buying it from Amazon - I know if I did and had the same problem I would literally have a replacement posted to me the following day without having to fill out a dozen forms and spend hours on the phone with customer support.

u801e 6y ago

> the early internet- content discovery was really hard for users. It wasn't as good as google is now, but search engines of the time did allow for discovery.

iorrus 6y ago
I thought it was much better back then, you could find niche sites that were of interest. Google seems to have banned all the interesting wild content that made the internet so fascinating in its early days. Blogs seem to have disappeared completely for instance and I have to specify the site to search to find anything e.g. site:Reddit.com However it does have an amazing ability to find comments on stackoverflow relevant to my needs based on a few keywords.

asdefghyk 6y ago

In about 1994 I recall the aim was to find a good page of links to whatever topic interested a person.

VBprogrammer 6y ago
Oh yeah, I remember discovering some great content from pages like that back in the day. I also vaguely remember the idea of content rings being a thing.

WaitWaitWha 6y ago

Hmmm... That is not how I remember it. I could gopher topics by early 90's, and Infoseek, Yahoo, WebCrawler, etc. were a full text search of pages by mid 90's. I distinctly recall searching usenet across multiple servers. Even before this, when data only flowed through uucp (or Fido), search was albeit queued, readily available. Your mileage may have varied; i just want to be clear that it was not that it did not exist, but new-comers would have a steeper learning curve. Today, it is expected, nay, demanded as a human right to be able to search the entire internet from a uniform and single klick search box. (yes, old crotchety, "in my day..." :) ) (edit: misspelurating stuffage)

Retric 6y ago
Yes, the earliest directories / search engines worked extremely well in large part because there minimal content. When there where 7 knitting websites they don’t need to worry about SEO. It was only after the users started getting hundreds of results for most searches that search engines needed to worry about filtering and prioritization.
- pmiller2 6y ago
  Here's a great example of why search engines started using more sophisticated examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_Google_bombs_in_the_2004_U.S._Presidential_election#Bombing_of_George_W._Bush https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_Google_bombs_in_the_... People started to understand how PageRank worked, and managed to get George W. Bush's official biography page at whitehouse.gov to the top of the search for "miserable failure." As I recall, this worked until at least 2008, maybe a couple years past that.
  - pmiller2 6y ago
    Whoops. s/examples/algorithms/
usefulcat 6y ago
The fact that you had even heard of gopher would have put you in a very small minority of internet users once dial-up internet access become relatively accessible (so, post-1995ish or so).

vishnugupta 6y ago

I can totally second this as someone who began surfing web in 1997 as a university student. Content discovery was next to non-existent. You had these directories like Y! or Lycos which more or less mirrored yellow pages. My group of friends would exchange interesting site links over e-mail, floppy disk or the good old way, write them down in a note book. Before you ask, internet surfing was only available in expensive public kiosks so browser book marks weren't of much use. Only when I got my own PC + internet in 2000 did I began using browser bookmarks. And then Google became popular around 2002 just when I entered post-graduation and changed web surfing forever.

janlaureys 6y ago
This brought back a long lost memory of when before we had internet at home. My dad took me to an internet cafe and I had printed a whole list beforehand of sites I wanted to visit. I had just guessed a bunch of random domain names based on my interests and things I thought would have a cool website. Stuff like porshe.com, titanic.com, mountainbiking.com, spaceshuttle.com.
hnlmorg 6y ago
People were commonly using Lycos and Yahoo as search engines by 1997. Sure, some of the more exciting content wasn’t stuff you’d think to search for and thus would often get shared via word of mouth (like the “Bert is evil” site that parodied the Sesame Street character in compromising photos...after all, which sane persons would search “Bert +hitler” ?) I think the limited time many people had on the internet (as you said, in some instances at Internet kiosks where you’d be limited to an hour at a time. Or on expensive dial up) probably contributed to people curating and sharing links offline between friends. But I do remember using search engines in that era specifically because AltaVista was widely regarded between myself and my peers to be the best search engine in terms of keyword syntax and the accuracy of the results. Remember this was the era before search engines popularised entering in natural language as a search query. Ask Jeeves (later renamed to just “Ask”) was actually the first to popularise that and even that was pre-2000 (it also largely sucked compared to keyword driven queries but I guess the tech wasn’t quiet there yet). I think it was 1999 when my friends and I first discovered Google. Back then Google was keyword query based too. The natural language side of Google came much later (mid-2000s at a guess). But what sold Google was its minimalist home page and the accuracy of its results. The minimalist home page was novel because search engines were considered internet portals before Google. Yahoo! Would have online games, chat rooms, site recommendations and email all accessible from its landing page and it was a similar story for many of the other search engines as well. They considered themselves the homepage of the internet (and in many ways they were right). Whereas Google went the opposite way and said “let’s strip as much guff from our landing page as possible” and is modem uses really welcomed that (plus the accuracy of its results too). It’s ironic just how heavy Google’s landing page has become. By 2000 the web had already felt like it had shifted from its adolescent years of anything goes and was starting to grow up. The stigma of meeting strangers online was fading and businesses were adopting the web as more than just a niche marketing tool - in part helped by Online payments becoming a thing with PayPal, WorldPay etc.

eloisant 6y ago

This, also search engines used to give a lot of weight to workds in domains so if you searched for "book", the search engine was likely to give you books.com as first result.

iso1631 6y ago

If you weren't in yahoo you weren't online On the other hand if you were in yahoo you were online. Type "books" into yahoo though and you'd be more likely to find books.com than amazon.com as the top page, and clearly "books.com" would sell books, who knows what "amazon.com" sells, something about Brazilian rivers?

jonathanstrange 6y ago

I used AltaVista and Hotbot all the time, as well as other search engines and curated pages, and there was no problem finding things. I believe most people used search engines and aggregation pages since entering the address in the browser bar would simply yield an error if you entered it wrong. Connecting the address bar to a search engine is fairly recent and was disputed a lot. Google did nothing particularly innovative or new, they just had the cleanest interface, their page was fast, and provided good results. That's what made them successful. Edit: On a side note, I feel really old now. :(

rusk 6y ago
Google had the best results by far. I remember around 2000 most “regular people” had pretty much given up on the web. It was google and maybe Napster that got people interested again... I wonder what it’ll be to fix the Internet this time around?
mathewsanders 6y ago
I also used Altavista and Hotbot (although I don’t remember why I could choose one over the other for a certain search). I do remember one point of difference was Google’s “I’m feeling lucky” option that just sent you to the first search result. I really liked that feature, but I’m guessing was removed in favor of growing impressions and ad revenues.
iorrus 6y ago
Exactly, the single feature that made me use google over yahoo/altavista was the clean interface, I was using dial up back then and it loaded very quickly the others were covered in ads.
autokad 6y ago
Altvista's edge over the competition at the time was that it indexed the most content. But google came in with pagerank and had superior results. There was a 3 year span or so where people just attributed google's success to minimalism. in terms of minimalism, hotbot was a disaster, but it was the algorithm that truly set google apart. minimalism has its good points, but falsely attributing it to google's success probably focused too much attention to it in the internet of the 2010s.

Zsolt 6y ago

The first time I had the chance to use the internet I typed in "whitehouse", hit enter and whitehouse.com loaded. It turned out to be a porn site, the teacher saw and I got banned from using the internet - in 40 seconds.

jdironman 6y ago
White House was the first time I ever seen porn / naked women. Cue me spending the next 6 months sneaking to load the page on dialup all hours of the day. To be a kind again. Now we have TBs of data but tend to be uncontent sometimes.
- rusk 6y ago
  Anybody ever type alta-vista.com by mistake? The search engine had no hyphen, this address went to something else ...
  - jdwithit 6y ago
    Heh, was about to post this one myself. My buddy got in big trouble in the high school computer lab making this typo. I wonder what percentage of domains in the late 90's were simply "adult" sites trying to capture traffic via typos. It certainly felt like a lot.
    - jstarfish 6y ago
      Then there was expertsexchange.com, which was always bound to disappoint one of two demographics.
      - nezgar 6y ago
        Heh, like the msexchange manager icon on your microsoft exchange server... :D
11235813213455 6y ago
what search engine was the culprit?

NDizzle 6y ago

The early internet, for me, was a 1-800 number BBS called Starfire. It had a splash page to the “internet” section that I’d assume was curated by the operator. This was probably 94 and 95.

syshum 6y ago

In some ways content was more discoverable back then. There was less of it, and it was objectively harder to get it online thus making the quality higher for the stuff that was there. Plus Web Directories, and Link lists where IMO better than keyword searches. They allowed you to find and follow topics faster. The explosion of content and google has made discovery harder unless you are one of the Top sites or platforms. All it takes it being on one of them, not being a good quality content. Want to sell a widget, you better sell it through amazon because chances are Google is going to index those results as the Top Results not your webstore. Even manufacturers that want to sell direct have to also have Amazon stores because the Amazon listing is the one of the only ways to get a top search spot