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If you say you'd pay for a search engine. Oof. Guys we used to just link useful things at the end of our blog posts and on our myspace pages. Then search engines came in and we didn't have to. Then they killed the SEO placement of blogs. Now you can't find anything useful unless you try their AI. The whole business model is convincing us we need them while they make the internet less efficient to scroll through.
... do you think MySpace came before search engines?
Replace Myspace with Geocities and it's broadly correct of my experience in 90s internet.
There were a ton of search engines in the 90s around the same time Geocities was released. AskJeeves was probably the most popular, but there was Altavista, Lycos, Dogpile, Yahoo... Shit, Google came out in 97, which was only a few years after Geocities.
When I had my Geocities website, I used Webcrawler as my preferred search engine. Cute spider and spiderweb iso/logo. Then came Altavista (altavista.digital.com, it was at first) and I switched. It brought more and better results. Somehow I never liked Lycos. And Yahoo, the first years, was a categorised catalogue/guide, kinda curated, and you had to submit a site to be considered to be added. You had to choose under which category (and subcategory, quite often) it should be listed. Also, at first, it wasn't Yahoo.com, it was buried in some .edu (or .ac, I don't quite recall) URL.
Webrings ftw
Yahoo Directory is the OG
Was altavista really a search engine?
Lycos
AskJeeves
Dogpile. Webcrawler. Gopher.
I was always partial to hotbot
Technically yes, but there were also a ton more, including Google.
You just dated the hell out of yourself, but also showed how young you are at the same time.
Haha, I'm too young to really have lived it, I'm only 26 so... I did experience the start of Facebook and Twitter. I'm very glad people who did live through it are expanding on it.
Yeah it sounds like you got online right when Web 2.0 was starting to really kick off. Back before then we did have search functions, though they were pretty primitive compared to what they've become now (and also before they went to shit with excessive SEO and advertising). Web 2.0 really marked the emphasis towards UX design and social network functionality within web sites/design, though people had links on their personal pages well before all that.