Pre-Google Web Relied on 5 Search Engines and Usenet for Discovery
Updated
Updated · Ars Technica · Aug 6
Pre-Google Web Relied on 5 Search Engines and Usenet for Discovery
3 articles · Updated · Ars Technica · Aug 6
Summary
AltaVista, Lycos, Excite, HotBot and Ask Jeeves were only part of how users found information on the mid-1990s web, when search had not yet consolidated into a single dominant interface.
Yahoo-style directories, bookmarks, email signatures and link-hopping still competed with machine indexing because the web was small enough for human curation to remain useful.
Usenet, launched in 1979, helped shape that discovery model by organizing information through topic-based newsgroups and community recommendations rather than one search box.
Nicole M. Radziwill, who used Usenet in 1990, said links in posts spread awareness organically, showing how pre-Google discovery was more social, fragmented and experimental than today’s web.