Yahoo for a while was becoming the world wide web, messenger, clubs, search, email and games all engaged with on a single identity, even turned down an offer to buy Google. Then it packed it all away and went home.

I was a dmoz editor for a bit. They created the directory that Yahoo used on their site. Kind of wish directories came back.

A few years ago while cleaning out my late grandmother's house, I found a physical book which was just a listing and description of various websites.

Ask jeeves was better at one point. It was an actual toss up which search engine was going to go well early 2000s.

The peak was during the period you could say "If you search on Google for ___ you get ___." Back when it was predictable. When they started personalizing results was the moment they sliced society's brake lines.

I remember...I had a Windows 8.1 machine, I needed to SSH into a Raspberry Pi. No Powershell, no native SSH client, the easiest way to get one was to install PuTTY. So I googled "putty". All lowercase, search engines sometimes get fucky when you start doing caps and punctuation, etc. I got an entire page of results for and about the TTY client, and nothing about drywall spackle or non-newtonian children's toys. Because I often search for stuff like that, it made a bet and went all in.

The horrifying part of that is, that innocuous example makes it sound great. I didn't have to overcome the "why did you name it that?" problem and refine the search by adding "tty client" or something like that. By getting to know me it took me to exactly what I wanted to find. When trying to find utility software, that's okay. That's not all people search the web for.

Now it's hooked up to the "You're right to call me out on that" machine, we're sliding down the mountainside upside down on fire.

I remember when the first result was worth reading.

I think it was better solely for the fact that you wouldn’t get ads in your search results

Now Google search is shit.

Billions of results and almost never anything relevant after the first page.

That’s overstating it. There’s a reason Google took over: it was better pretty much all around. The original Google algorithm was a really amazing tool for finding quality content on the web as it existed in those days. That was before SEO drove all these focused efforts on gaming the system.

With that said, Alta Vista definitely was the most promising tool before Google, and it had some potential if it hadn’t been so poorly managed by DEC. They simply saw it as a cool demo for their Alpha server platform, and never had any vision for it as a meaningful product on its own.

Could this be what you're looking for?

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/corners-of-internet/ijaflnclbgjafchiipbgjlgiikbgfabd

On a related note: every search engine under the sun now has AI built in EXCEPT the one called "Ask Jeeves". If any of them should have been 100% AI, it was this one. And instead, it fucking died in the middle of all this.

God I miss surfing

I see you. Not enough people are going to get this one.