3 ms·

I strongly disagree with this. Just the fact that the homepage was minimalist and just a search field and the results made it category defining. And the resul

• jsjohnst 4y ago
  > Just the fact that the homepage was minimalist Sure, the homepage of Altavista was a relic of the 90s. The SERP however wasn’t as radically different. If a minimal homepage is enough to be “category defining” to you, we can just agree to disagree and move on.
  • oarsinsync 4y ago
    Having used excite, Infoseek, Lycos, yahoo, askjeeves, Altavista, and even astalavista, my recollection is that they all (bar yahoo’s manually curated index) sucked for any high quality content. Then google came around, yahoo initially integrated them for non-catalogued content, and they took off, absolutely dominating the competition. There’s a reason we “Google it” and don’t “altavista it”. ISTR altavista’s pitch over yahoo was that they indexed the entire web, they just couldn’t return meaningful results. Google could.
    • m3talsmith 4y ago
      AltaVista was absolutely great! I got way more interesting content through them! Their death was a real loss that finally forced me to use Google, and not for the better.
    • toast0 4y ago
      From my recollection, the unique thing about google search wasn't that it was good. All of those search engines (and more) were good at some point. The unique thing is that Google remained good for 10+ years. The others tended to get significantly less good pretty quickly. We probably verbed google rather than other products, because of that consistency. But at least my kid's peer group seems to have taken to using 'search up' as their verb... Kind of like look up.