5 ms·
They were so confident about their search results that they were giving links to their competitors' websites at the bottom of their page
by dm8 13y ago
They were so confident about their search results that they were giving links to their competitors' websites at the bottom of their page
- encoderer 13y agoThat was standard trade craft back then. Everybody did it.
- dm8 13y agoWhy? What was the reasoning?
- adventured 13y agoThree reasons. First, professional courtesy. Search was a very small world in 1998 (that is, in terms of people working in the field). There was an academic quality to the industry, with a lot of freshly minted college kids, teachers and universities involved. Second, a stamp of confidence in their technology. That is: if we're not doing a good enough job, we deserve to lose, and here's our competition. Third, money. Companies often paid to be listed at the bottom of search engines. In 1998 Google was still highly reliant on partners that used their search technology (they were battling eg Inktomi in this respect).
- yid 13y agoAre you by any chance a former Inktomi developer?
- ronilan 13y agoBack then people didn't care their site will leak PR ;)
- andrewaylett 13y agoIt's a bit of a shame that the link to AltaVista doesn't point to the search engine site. I think they did eventually get altavista.com (it redirects to Yahoo now) but the IA link given pre-dates that.