Remembering the pre-Google web: when search was an experiment
Summary
The article revisits the pre-Google era of search, describing how early engines like AltaVista, Lycos, Excite, HotBot, and Ask Jeeves, along with Yahoo directories and Usenet, shaped discovery before PageRank. It emphasizes the shift from human curation to crawlers and how Google transformed expectations around speed, usability, and trust in search. This historical perspective offers valuable context for information retrieval and the evolution of web platforms.