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don't forget the greatest webdevs of the late 90s...Larry and Sergey people now don't seem to appreciate how much Google's radically simple homepage changed th

don't forget the greatest webdevs of the late 90s...Larry and Sergey people now don't seem to appreciate how much Google's radically simple homepage changed the web look at web design right before Google took off - it was always about adding more to the page, and most sites were a mess Larry and Sergey showed that radical simplicity was literally worth a trillion dollars

ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
I remember thinking that “The Google” was onto something, when my friends told me that they were replacing AltaVista with it, as their main search engine.
- rchaud 1y ago
  I started using Google after reading an article about it on Time Magazine sometime in '99.
JimDabell 1y ago
The simplicity was nice, but people switched to Google because of PageRank.
- unilynx 1y ago
  and not having sponsored links back then
- oldpersonintx2 1y ago
  right, but they could have polluted the google.com page with endless garbage based off of the popularity of search....but they didn't for example...they could have dropped some links below the search bar to some homegrown sports site they set up...and that would have become the most popular sports site...its hard for most people to resist that
  - TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
    You have a point. Here's what Alta Vista looked like. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltaVista https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltaVista Google's simplicity and clarity became part of the brand. No one else was doing that at the time. Even "efficient" designs were maximalist, so extreme minimalism with a splash of colour was a real innovation.
    - giantrobot 1y ago
      When AltaVista first appeared its landing page was much sparser than that. Even a year earlier [0] its homepage was pretty sparse and simple. Unfortunately AltaVista got hit with the web portal bug and the site got more bloated. Unfortunately the search also got worse as spammers figured out how to game its search algorithms. [0] https://web.archive.org/web/19980423064646/http://altavista.digital.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/19980423064646/http://altavista....

ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago

I remember thinking that “The Google” was onto something, when my friends told me that they were replacing AltaVista with it, as their main search engine.

rchaud 1y ago
I started using Google after reading an article about it on Time Magazine sometime in '99.

JimDabell 1y ago

The simplicity was nice, but people switched to Google because of PageRank.

unilynx 1y ago
and not having sponsored links back then
oldpersonintx2 1y ago
right, but they could have polluted the google.com page with endless garbage based off of the popularity of search....but they didn't for example...they could have dropped some links below the search bar to some homegrown sports site they set up...and that would have become the most popular sports site...its hard for most people to resist that
- TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
  You have a point. Here's what Alta Vista looked like. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltaVista https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltaVista Google's simplicity and clarity became part of the brand. No one else was doing that at the time. Even "efficient" designs were maximalist, so extreme minimalism with a splash of colour was a real innovation.
  - giantrobot 1y ago
    When AltaVista first appeared its landing page was much sparser than that. Even a year earlier [0] its homepage was pretty sparse and simple. Unfortunately AltaVista got hit with the web portal bug and the site got more bloated. Unfortunately the search also got worse as spammers figured out how to game its search algorithms. [0] https://web.archive.org/web/19980423064646/http://altavista.digital.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/19980423064646/http://altavista....