zlacker

What? Webrings?

Don't tell me you forgot Yahoo, Excite, Altavista, Lycos, and all those other search engines existed! Lycos also had hotbot and tripod.com, back when homepages were your internet presence instead of social media.

Maybe Google had results that were a bit more relevant and won that competition, but they didn't Change Everything.

>>PostOn+(OP)
Where are they now? Yahoo was good before google, but google did change everything.

It's as if you brought up the first Motorola phone or blackberry and compared it to the iPhone saying it was just ok.

>>graphe+16
Google changed everything but nowadays it feels as bad as Yahoo was at the time. Google search is now optimised for ad $$$, not for finding what you're looking for. If Google hadn't existed then maybe we would have got competitiveness in the search space.

>>zarzav+Ik
It would have been another hegemony. Yahoo was google then. AskJeeves, AltaVista and many others were not ever going to be competition. Yahoo was the stronger one then and it failed.

Who do you think it would have been competitive for?

>>PostOn+(OP)
It is already back to that. I use scholar.google.com, semanticscholar, reddit search, chatgpt, public data sets, as well as all the search engines everyday. No one has everything indexed properly.

The GPT LLMs just raise the bar for information retrieval. And so it goes.