7 ms·

Because other people have given good answers, I just wanted to add.. the Web was so much better linked together back then. Prior to Altavista made searching use

Because other people have given good answers, I just wanted to add.. the Web was so much better linked together back then. Prior to Altavista made searching useful most of the time, it was common to rely on jumping from one site to another through plentiful link pages, web rings, and lists of resources that people had put together. There was also Usenet which people often posted links on and which was sorted by topic and a handy way to find stuff.

euxneks 13y ago
ah.. web rings.. I remember babylon 5 web rings... Nostalgia's a hell of a thing.
- mickeyp 13y ago
  Web Rings were amazing though; found a great site about X-Files plot theories? -- no problem, chances are you'd find more that were like that by following the web ring. We lost something back then that, even today, we never really got back...
- visarga 13y ago
  If we knew back then what is common knowledge today, we could build an early version of Google search in a few months. Web spider, parsing HTML, extracting links and text, computing Page Rank and then making an inverted index to look up info by keyword. Imagine this would have been 100 times better than Yahoo's links and Altavista's search. By the way, syntax highlight thinks "Altavista" is a spelling error. Talk about becoming the footnote of history. Google was the company that took the lead from AV and now Google's own browser can't understand their main competitor of 10 years ago. AV did it to themselves, putting all that shit on the homepage and not providing good results. LOL
  - dredmorbius 13y ago
    Search was actually anticipated (along with social graphs) by TBL in his first WWW proposal documents, posted to HN a few months back.
    - TazeTSchnitzel 13y ago
      It was anticipated in the protocol, that's what ? is for.
Nate75Sanders 13y ago
Seconded. Even after Altavista was clearly better than Yahoo for ad-hoc searches, I still used Yahoo a lot because their topic hierarchy was a really great way to sit down and learn about some topic and its sub-topics. I was particularly keen on this while eating because you could browse the web with just the mouse very easily.
howeman 13y ago
I was at a computer camp sometime around '94, and the camp had a printed "Directory of web pages" which was exactly like the yellow pages of the phone book. You would look up a subject, and it had a printed list of urls on that subject.
- andyjohnson0 13y ago
  I still have a copy of "The Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog" published by O'Reilly in 1992. It has a whole section devoted to lists of addresses of sites grouped by subject. Many of the sites didn't have urls because they were operating over ftp or telnet or WAIS or Gopher. I just checked and the terms "google", "altavista", and "search engine" do not appear anywhere in the index. Also, no weird web2.0-style domain names. Different times.
at-fates-hands 13y ago
>There was also Usenet which people often posted links on and which was sorted by topic and a handy way to find stuff. When my college roommate showed me how to download a graduate student's thesis from Usenet, I thought my head was going to explode I thought it was so cool. Here I am, halfway across the country, and I can download, read and cite some grad student's paper from the University of California Berkeley. I now feel like a guy who grew up during the 1950's when you tell kids, "Yeah, the internet wasn't always about Reddit and Porn kiddies."
- dwd 13y ago
  You had alt.religion.kibology and the first crowd-sourcing app in The Internet Oracle. The technology changes but we seem to keep reinventing the wheel every time the cart gets overcrowded.
  - hobs 13y ago
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September What should we do about it?
    - derleth 13y ago
      Implying we should 'fix' Eternal September is pretty close to implying we should keep important technology out of the hands of those the current users deem unworthy. That prevents both spam and the Arab Spring, both 4chan and Wikileaks. Keeping the Internet as it was prior to 1991, when commercial access was first allowed, means keeping it a small, controlled entity with obvious choke points that make it trivial to censor or kill entirely. It largely prevents its use for social or political change other than the kinds of change its owners want to see. It would trivialize the Internet by relegating it to a tiny fraction of its current usefulness. It's easy to idealize what we had. However, losing sight of what we have now, and what we could have, is actively harmful to the prospect of future moral growth.
      - jbert 13y ago
SilasX 13y ago
As late as 1998 I remember a friend griping about people who said that a site on topic X was good "because of the links".
- qw 13y ago
  Couldn't the same be said about Hacker News? Search has improved, but we still rely on "sites with links" to find interesting content.
  - SilasX 13y ago
    He (and they) meant the static links, not the regular updates.
devb 13y ago
Does anyone know why altavista.com and altavista.digital.com were different? I just remember preferring the digital.com version for some reason. I wish I could go back in time to 1996... everything on the internet seemed so much more meaningful, not to mention textual (because images took so long to download).
- Alex3917 13y ago
  > everything on the internet seemed so much more meaningful Back then it almost felt like we were in the heroic age of internet communities, to borrow a phrase used about a period of American inventors. It'll never be like that again, but there are more good things coming in the future.
soundgecko 13y ago
I wish there was still a curated list of categorized websites.
- brazzy 13y ago
  http://www.dmoz.org/ http://www.dmoz.org/
weland 13y ago
Yes! I will gladly second that. The sheer amount of information back then was nothing compared to what it was today, but it was so much easier to browse around. Something as trivial as a webring was a cement for a community rather than a pledge for traffic. Despite the nostalgia, I do think that, overall, the WWW experience has mostly gotten better since then, if only for the amount of information and communication. However, the density of quality has rather shrunk...
swah 13y ago
Did you use tabs back then?
lewispollard 13y ago
Wow, web rings, huge nostalgia for that!
TazeTSchnitzel 13y ago
So, the web back then is what Wikipedia is today?
- dredmorbius 13y ago
  That's not a bad characterization. Web pages were static, many were long-form, they tended to provide information, and link copiously to one another. What they lacked was collaborative editing, though Ward Cunningham was already working on that at the time. Wikis postdated the Web only by a brief bit.

euxneks 13y ago

ah.. web rings.. I remember babylon 5 web rings... Nostalgia's a hell of a thing.

mickeyp 13y ago
Web Rings were amazing though; found a great site about X-Files plot theories? -- no problem, chances are you'd find more that were like that by following the web ring. We lost something back then that, even today, we never really got back...
visarga 13y ago
If we knew back then what is common knowledge today, we could build an early version of Google search in a few months. Web spider, parsing HTML, extracting links and text, computing Page Rank and then making an inverted index to look up info by keyword. Imagine this would have been 100 times better than Yahoo's links and Altavista's search. By the way, syntax highlight thinks "Altavista" is a spelling error. Talk about becoming the footnote of history. Google was the company that took the lead from AV and now Google's own browser can't understand their main competitor of 10 years ago. AV did it to themselves, putting all that shit on the homepage and not providing good results. LOL
- dredmorbius 13y ago
  Search was actually anticipated (along with social graphs) by TBL in his first WWW proposal documents, posted to HN a few months back.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 13y ago
    It was anticipated in the protocol, that's what ? is for.

Nate75Sanders 13y ago

Seconded. Even after Altavista was clearly better than Yahoo for ad-hoc searches, I still used Yahoo a lot because their topic hierarchy was a really great way to sit down and learn about some topic and its sub-topics. I was particularly keen on this while eating because you could browse the web with just the mouse very easily.

howeman 13y ago

I was at a computer camp sometime around '94, and the camp had a printed "Directory of web pages" which was exactly like the yellow pages of the phone book. You would look up a subject, and it had a printed list of urls on that subject.

andyjohnson0 13y ago
I still have a copy of "The Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog" published by O'Reilly in 1992. It has a whole section devoted to lists of addresses of sites grouped by subject. Many of the sites didn't have urls because they were operating over ftp or telnet or WAIS or Gopher. I just checked and the terms "google", "altavista", and "search engine" do not appear anywhere in the index. Also, no weird web2.0-style domain names. Different times.

at-fates-hands 13y ago

>There was also Usenet which people often posted links on and which was sorted by topic and a handy way to find stuff. When my college roommate showed me how to download a graduate student's thesis from Usenet, I thought my head was going to explode I thought it was so cool. Here I am, halfway across the country, and I can download, read and cite some grad student's paper from the University of California Berkeley. I now feel like a guy who grew up during the 1950's when you tell kids, "Yeah, the internet wasn't always about Reddit and Porn kiddies."

dwd 13y ago
You had alt.religion.kibology and the first crowd-sourcing app in The Internet Oracle. The technology changes but we seem to keep reinventing the wheel every time the cart gets overcrowded.
- hobs 13y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September What should we do about it?
  - derleth 13y ago
    Implying we should 'fix' Eternal September is pretty close to implying we should keep important technology out of the hands of those the current users deem unworthy. That prevents both spam and the Arab Spring, both 4chan and Wikileaks. Keeping the Internet as it was prior to 1991, when commercial access was first allowed, means keeping it a small, controlled entity with obvious choke points that make it trivial to censor or kill entirely. It largely prevents its use for social or political change other than the kinds of change its owners want to see. It would trivialize the Internet by relegating it to a tiny fraction of its current usefulness. It's easy to idealize what we had. However, losing sight of what we have now, and what we could have, is actively harmful to the prospect of future moral growth.
    - jbert 13y ago

SilasX 13y ago

As late as 1998 I remember a friend griping about people who said that a site on topic X was good "because of the links".

qw 13y ago
Couldn't the same be said about Hacker News? Search has improved, but we still rely on "sites with links" to find interesting content.
- SilasX 13y ago
  He (and they) meant the static links, not the regular updates.

devb 13y ago

Does anyone know why altavista.com and altavista.digital.com were different? I just remember preferring the digital.com version for some reason. I wish I could go back in time to 1996... everything on the internet seemed so much more meaningful, not to mention textual (because images took so long to download).

Alex3917 13y ago
> everything on the internet seemed so much more meaningful Back then it almost felt like we were in the heroic age of internet communities, to borrow a phrase used about a period of American inventors. It'll never be like that again, but there are more good things coming in the future.

soundgecko 13y ago

I wish there was still a curated list of categorized websites.

brazzy 13y ago
http://www.dmoz.org/ http://www.dmoz.org/

weland 13y ago

Yes! I will gladly second that. The sheer amount of information back then was nothing compared to what it was today, but it was so much easier to browse around. Something as trivial as a webring was a cement for a community rather than a pledge for traffic. Despite the nostalgia, I do think that, overall, the WWW experience has mostly gotten better since then, if only for the amount of information and communication. However, the density of quality has rather shrunk...

swah 13y ago

Did you use tabs back then?

lewispollard 13y ago

Wow, web rings, huge nostalgia for that!

TazeTSchnitzel 13y ago

So, the web back then is what Wikipedia is today?

dredmorbius 13y ago
That's not a bad characterization. Web pages were static, many were long-form, they tended to provide information, and link copiously to one another. What they lacked was collaborative editing, though Ward Cunningham was already working on that at the time. Wikis postdated the Web only by a brief bit.