Re:Altavista: The rise and fall of the biggest pre-Google se...
by Noumenon72 on Friday February 15, 2019 @11:49PM
(#19177129)
I was expecting you to say Google won because it didn't put out one of those adware toolbars crowding your browser. I would never install one of those. I just put Google as my home page.
Re:Altavista: The rise and fall of the biggest pre-Google se...
by ramraj07 on Saturday February 16, 2019 @08:35AM
(#19178480)
Times were different back then. And unlike other toolbars I distinctly remember Google's toolbar being actually useful and worth the space.
Re:Altavista: The rise and fall of the biggest pre-Google se...
by unilynx on Sunday February 17, 2019 @05:05AM
(#19183679)
Only installed it because it was the easiest way to look up a page's pagerank.
Surprised that it still exists! https://www.google.com/intl/nl/toolbar/ie/index.html - and the screenshot even seems to show a "share to google+" :)
I didn't know anything about Google until mid 2000, and when I used it, I just thought it was an AltaVista clone.
Fast forward to fall 2000, and once after getting bad results on AltaVista, I tried Google again. At the time, I never bookmarked either of the sites or set them as my homepage. I remember, when I used Google, I thought to myself, "I'm going to switch to whoever comes out with a browser toolbar. Search should just be part of the browser."
About a week later, I had some bad results on AltaVista, and typed in google.com. Immediately I saw the "try our toolbar" banner.
At that point, I switched to Google, and I NEVER went back to AltaVista. (I think sometime in 2001 I tried AltaVista again, out of loyalty, to see if they finally had a toolbar, but the results were so bad I was in shock.)