4 ms·

Google was easily 10x better than any of their competition. It was effectively alone in the market. Most of us were using 56k modems to access the internet bac

Google was easily 10x better than any of their competition. It was effectively alone in the market. Most of us were using 56k modems to access the internet back then, Google's search returned results within a couple of seconds. Yahoo, Lycos, Excite, Alta-Vista were still loading. Then the search results themselves were so good you could often just pick the first result. They eventually added a button which just took you directly to the first result. Which I used.

vinnymac 4mo ago
Curious, why do you say that as if the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button isn't still on the homepage in 2026?
- bravoetch 4mo ago
  I couldn't even tell you when I used the Google search page. It's been years at least. I wouldn't be surprised if many other people also don't go there to search. I assume most search straight in the url bar.
  - esseph 4mo ago
    Home pages are still a thing are are often set to google
- consp 4mo ago
  Because it is useless now.
- sunnybeetroot 4mo ago
  Because it’s not there on mobile
bsder 4mo ago
> Alta-Vista were still loading Your memory is faulty. AltaVista was always super fast--it never had the advertising bloat that the other ones had until the very end. The problem AltaVista had was that it didn't scale when the Internet went exponential--so AltaVista would give you good search results until you asked current, topical questions. AltaVista relied on running a single, super-expensive stonking huge Alpha machine while Google ran on lots of commodity servers that spidered constantly.
- BryantD 4mo ago
  This is inaccurate. When I was running AV operations around 2000, we were running on a couple dozen huge Alpha machines for the index layer and queries. We had a bunch of smaller machines for Web serving, and a high memory set of Alphas as a caching layer. See https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedings/ana97/summaries/monier.html https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedin... for the 1997 server count, which was before we got to the three tier architecture. We also spidered constantly. A couple of those huge backend Alphas were dedicated to holding the constant spider index. AV had a well earned reputation for quick discovery, although I think Google wound up faster. We suffered a bit from maintaining separate indexes for the main corpus and recent pages, and I imagine Google handled that better. But the period of time when our main index went to hell was the period of time when we failed to do a new main index crawl for several months. I won’t get into why that happened politically because my memory isn’t perfect and I don’t want to criticize anyone who won’t see this to stand up for themselves, but it’s absolutely the case that we let the index get stale. And I will say that I think the execs were distracted by the idea of challenging Yahoo by buying a shopping site and a local news site of sorts and, unlike the Google of the time, they lacked the wisdom to focus on our primary product. And now I fade back into the hedges, until the next time AV comes up… I suspect a high percentage of my HN comments are on this exact topic. It makes me sad.
  - bsder 4mo ago
    I stand corrected. Thanks for all your work. And I still miss the AltaVista illustrated diagram (Java Applet) that would allow you to drill down and specialize the search results. No modern search has ever matched that, again.
    - jhy 4mo ago
      That feature sounds amazing! I tried searching wayback etc but wasn't able to find any more details. Do you happen to know of any screenshots / deeper descriptions for it? Perhaps we could nerd snipe Marginalia Search to add it :)
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
scoofy 4mo ago
Yea, that's easy to say now. I was a relatively early investor (2008), but I was very hesitant early on because Microsoft was building an integrated search function, which became Windows Live Search, which became Bing. I definitely remember it took me to the beginning of the financial crisis to finally decide that it was going nowhere. I suspect it was the development of Google Maps that changed my mind.
- ethbr1 4mo ago
  "Google" of today is really AdSense ($102M, 2003) -> Android ($50M+?, 2005) -> YouTube ($1.6B, 2006) -> Google Docs ($50M+?, 2006) Without those prescient and lucky acquisitions, we'd be talking about a "Google" that looked much more like Yahoo. It wasn't search proficiency that built the empire, it was leveraging a transient search quality advantage into cash flow, then plowing that cash into acquisitions to construct a durable moat.
  - icedchai 4mo ago
    I remember late 90's, early 2000's Google. Search result quality was still better than the competition (mainly Altavista...)
    - ethbr1 4mo ago
      But that only would have lasted until the next search innovation and/or competitors copied Google's indexing.
      - icedchai 4mo ago
        There were many search engines around during that time. Yahoo, Excite, Microsoft Live Search, Lycos... I don't recall any of them improving enough to rival early 2000's Google.
        ethbr1 4mo ago
        None of those scaled as quickly as Google in terms of revenue (read: AdSense), and Microsoft lost interest.

vinnymac 4mo ago

Curious, why do you say that as if the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button isn't still on the homepage in 2026?

bravoetch 4mo ago
I couldn't even tell you when I used the Google search page. It's been years at least. I wouldn't be surprised if many other people also don't go there to search. I assume most search straight in the url bar.
- esseph 4mo ago
  Home pages are still a thing are are often set to google
consp 4mo ago
Because it is useless now.
sunnybeetroot 4mo ago
Because it’s not there on mobile

bsder 4mo ago

> Alta-Vista were still loading Your memory is faulty. AltaVista was always super fast--it never had the advertising bloat that the other ones had until the very end. The problem AltaVista had was that it didn't scale when the Internet went exponential--so AltaVista would give you good search results until you asked current, topical questions. AltaVista relied on running a single, super-expensive stonking huge Alpha machine while Google ran on lots of commodity servers that spidered constantly.

BryantD 4mo ago
This is inaccurate. When I was running AV operations around 2000, we were running on a couple dozen huge Alpha machines for the index layer and queries. We had a bunch of smaller machines for Web serving, and a high memory set of Alphas as a caching layer. See https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedings/ana97/summaries/monier.html https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedin... for the 1997 server count, which was before we got to the three tier architecture. We also spidered constantly. A couple of those huge backend Alphas were dedicated to holding the constant spider index. AV had a well earned reputation for quick discovery, although I think Google wound up faster. We suffered a bit from maintaining separate indexes for the main corpus and recent pages, and I imagine Google handled that better. But the period of time when our main index went to hell was the period of time when we failed to do a new main index crawl for several months. I won’t get into why that happened politically because my memory isn’t perfect and I don’t want to criticize anyone who won’t see this to stand up for themselves, but it’s absolutely the case that we let the index get stale. And I will say that I think the execs were distracted by the idea of challenging Yahoo by buying a shopping site and a local news site of sorts and, unlike the Google of the time, they lacked the wisdom to focus on our primary product. And now I fade back into the hedges, until the next time AV comes up… I suspect a high percentage of my HN comments are on this exact topic. It makes me sad.
- bsder 4mo ago
  I stand corrected. Thanks for all your work. And I still miss the AltaVista illustrated diagram (Java Applet) that would allow you to drill down and specialize the search results. No modern search has ever matched that, again.
  - jhy 4mo ago
    That feature sounds amazing! I tried searching wayback etc but wasn't able to find any more details. Do you happen to know of any screenshots / deeper descriptions for it? Perhaps we could nerd snipe Marginalia Search to add it :)

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

scoofy 4mo ago

Yea, that's easy to say now. I was a relatively early investor (2008), but I was very hesitant early on because Microsoft was building an integrated search function, which became Windows Live Search, which became Bing. I definitely remember it took me to the beginning of the financial crisis to finally decide that it was going nowhere. I suspect it was the development of Google Maps that changed my mind.

ethbr1 4mo ago
"Google" of today is really AdSense ($102M, 2003) -> Android ($50M+?, 2005) -> YouTube ($1.6B, 2006) -> Google Docs ($50M+?, 2006) Without those prescient and lucky acquisitions, we'd be talking about a "Google" that looked much more like Yahoo. It wasn't search proficiency that built the empire, it was leveraging a transient search quality advantage into cash flow, then plowing that cash into acquisitions to construct a durable moat.
- icedchai 4mo ago
  I remember late 90's, early 2000's Google. Search result quality was still better than the competition (mainly Altavista...)
  - ethbr1 4mo ago
    But that only would have lasted until the next search innovation and/or competitors copied Google's indexing.
    - icedchai 4mo ago
      There were many search engines around during that time. Yahoo, Excite, Microsoft Live Search, Lycos... I don't recall any of them improving enough to rival early 2000's Google.
      - ethbr1 4mo ago
        None of those scaled as quickly as Google in terms of revenue (read: AdSense), and Microsoft lost interest.