News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Altavista: The rise and fall of the biggest pre-Google search engine. Parent comment

Re:Altavista: The rise and fall of the biggest pre-Google se... by octorian on Friday February 15, 2019 @11:13AM (#19172039)
> Essentially we all agreed the web was unusable because it was too hard to find what you were looking for

Back in those days, I was a fan on the Yahoo! directory approach. The web was still small and explore-able, so a directory actually was useful if you didn't actually know what you were specifically looking for.

Meanwhile, if I did know what I was looking for, AltaVista gave me endless pages of random links that were only vaguely related to my search query. I don't think I ever found myself liking it much.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Altavista: The rise and fall of the biggest pre-Google se... by dontbenebby on Friday February 15, 2019 @02:37PM (#19174012)
Yahoo was good for discovery IMHO. Yahoo + webrings + Geocities neighborhoods lead to a fun feeling of exploration I rarely feel nowadays.
[ Parent | on HN ]