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Comment by pkdpic | Hacker News Reader

This makes me remember that my primary way of finding new things on the web back in middle school was just typing educated guess urls in until I found something.

Makes me wonder how interesting the web might be if I just started doing that again, and how boring it might have been if I'd just had a working search engine back then.

Then again I also seem to remember getting bored enough with the web to only spend an hour or two on it at a time. Also I was in middle / elementary school so that might have played a role too.

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If you did that now you'll run into sites with no content but a banner at the top with contact details so you can buy the domain.

Yep, I got it on the first try. personalrobotics dot com. Not a neat robot hacker website, not even a company selling robots. Just a $300k domain squat.

or much much worse. NSFW klaxon alarms and visits from HR for viewing this content at work type situations.

Thats a good point, I remember a bit of this back in the day but not sure how common it was. One my best friend and I still joke about to this day was tree.com, I seem to remember it wasn't even for sale, just a squat for squats sake or something. Good times.

Or a page full of ads.

Parking domains have been a staple of the internet since its inception.

oh the days of the under construction animGifs

I remember one such website that was nothing but a collection of every single under construction GIF they could find.

This makes me remember that my primary way of finding new things on the web back in middle school was just typing educated guess urls in until I found something.

It was nice back in the early days when you wanted U.S. state government information, you could almost always enter something like http://state.xx.us and get the state's home page, then explore from there. (Where xx was the state abbreviation.)

Cities were very often http://city.state.xx.us.

Now many (most?) states have vanity URLs, and the cities are worse. I think Chicago's changed its URL at least three times.

Google built their index by externalizing the human cost of curation, aka Webrings. Now all the webrings are dead, because humans are easily tempted by lazy search into not maintaining them. I wish they weren’t. They were a better form of curation than anything since.

I wonder how realistic a hybrid of human and algorithmic curation would be.

Obviously the internet has an enormously long tail, but if a company could ‘curate’/rank the top 10,000 most popular sites, that might still be useful.

See if you can find a mirror of Yahoo from 1996.

I once made a website called bobswhitetrousers.com, absolutely noone ever visited.

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