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Comment by randcraw | Hacker News Reader

Make that 25 years ago, before the FAANGs came out.

N'ah, I remember that era. Search engines were basically worthless. Google was the first one to get the formula right.

Before Google, search engines were basically just doing keyword matching and so you'd have the issue that every search for a programming topic landed you on expertsexchange. Google was the first to start leveraging click-away signal, and they were able to successfully down-sample keyword-farmers like that one and their ilk.

Search engines were bad in the 90's, but the web was much smaller and community-driven. Most of the websites people visited were created by individuals and people linked to each other to form web rings.

I remember.

It was the worst. Crawling a ring all day to find useful content was incredibly inconvenient.

Expertsexchange was one of the main reasons I began contributing to Stack Overflow in 2010-ish.

I wouldn't consider 1998 a peak. There was a local maxima in 1993, before the September that never ended. Then the rest of the 90's were exciting because of the rapid growth, but the actual state of things at the time was pretty messy. I'd personally put the next peak around 2007. Broadband was widespread but smartphones were not. Google existed but hadn't yet purchased DoubleClick. IE6, while not quite dead, no longer had a stranglehold on web development. Independent blogs and forums and RSS were still big, and hadn't yet consolidated with social media.

I'm not going back to using Alta Vista, no thanks.

The early Yahoo was pretty great. I discovered a lot of cool creative sites there, none of whom tracked me or abused my email address.

Google came out in 1998, 25 years ago.

still like the new internet to be honest.

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