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> I honestly think it was less about having a clean homepage than it was a single text input for searches. All of the other search engines just had a single te
by hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
> I honestly think it was less about having a clean homepage than it was a single text input for searches.
All of the other search engines just had a single text input for searches, too, e.g. https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/gallery/altavista-2000 https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/gallery/altavista-2000
By far the biggest reason was that the results were soooo much better. All of the other search engines basically used some variation of keyword matching in the document itself, which is why you'd see so many pages back in that time that were loaded with superfluous keywords. It was Google's original PageRank incarnation that made all the difference early on.
- taeric 3y agoI'm sure I'm remembering the "advanced search" that other sites had. I feel that those were more common back then. Granted, most of my searches back then were probably in libraries and such? The "advanced" search UI was amusing. You would click there thinking that you could give a better search, but you often got worse results by trying to use all of the fields. Google not really having an advanced search at least let you cycle more rapidly on raw searches.