So we’re talking about SEO and the content being generated in the first place? Yeah, it’s worse than it used to be when the main application online was websites, but I still want/need a reliable way to parse results across… you know, Wikipedia and Reddit, mostly. IMDB sometimes. It may have looped around to the old days of Altavista directory search, but it’s still a valuable tool. And crucially not replaced by an LLM, especially for the kind of non-obvious queries where you don´t just go to the site you know will have the answer directly.
Altavista was the shit when it came out. My classmates and friends were surprised at how quick I was getting answers or general information. Altavista, that’s it. If you’re using Ask Jeeves or Yahoo you’re going to have a hard time.
I can’t remember how I found out about it, but it’s what I used until Google came out. Anyone know if they were the first to use web crawlers like that or did they just popularize the concept?
I’m fuzzy on the timeline, but it was definitely THE search engine for a while. And I’d say the one that’s most memory-holed. I feel like Yahoo’s unlikely survival as some vestigial online service made people remember it and I guess Americans in particular had an Ask Jeeves moment at some point? For me it was Altavista until Google, for sure, and they were trading blows for a good while. I almost remember Gmail being the thing that tipped the scales more than the search quality.
So we’re talking about SEO and the content being generated in the first place? Yeah, it’s worse than it used to be when the main application online was websites, but I still want/need a reliable way to parse results across… you know, Wikipedia and Reddit, mostly. IMDB sometimes. It may have looped around to the old days of Altavista directory search, but it’s still a valuable tool. And crucially not replaced by an LLM, especially for the kind of non-obvious queries where you don´t just go to the site you know will have the answer directly.
Altavista was the shit when it came out. My classmates and friends were surprised at how quick I was getting answers or general information. Altavista, that’s it. If you’re using Ask Jeeves or Yahoo you’re going to have a hard time.
I can’t remember how I found out about it, but it’s what I used until Google came out. Anyone know if they were the first to use web crawlers like that or did they just popularize the concept?
I’m fuzzy on the timeline, but it was definitely THE search engine for a while. And I’d say the one that’s most memory-holed. I feel like Yahoo’s unlikely survival as some vestigial online service made people remember it and I guess Americans in particular had an Ask Jeeves moment at some point? For me it was Altavista until Google, for sure, and they were trading blows for a good while. I almost remember Gmail being the thing that tipped the scales more than the search quality.