Back then the internet wasn’t so persistently and automatically indexed, so most people used a portal that indexed as it went at semi-regular intervals. But the whole “google spiders crawling for pages” thing didn’t really exist and a lot of them did it entirely manually.
Basically take a website homepage concept and apply it to your browser internet navigation. The portal would be how you search/navigate initially.
Think of it like a car dashboard with tons of information but 90% of is irrelevant. There’s a search (each one had very different results), there’s a weather widget, maybe some news headlines, maybe some suggested web pages or new ones. Stock market ticker, comic of the day, just throwing stuff at the wall because more features = better. Very cluttered and busy. Like early MySpace.
So google comes in and does three important things: comprehensive and consistent indexing coupled with an excellent search ranking system that was a decade ahead of everyone, and killed the clutter.
Ask Jeeves, Alta vista, etc. kind of cracked indexing as well but they just could not crack giving relevant results at such a consistent rate as Google. Until a couple of years ago almost no one ever looked at page 2 of search results on google, no matter how obscure the search. Your first 1-10 hits usually did it even in the early 2000’s. It was truly a marvel.
I don’t know what they mean by ‘portal litter’, but lol. They do every other thing they listed now.
Back then the internet wasn’t so persistently and automatically indexed, so most people used a portal that indexed as it went at semi-regular intervals. But the whole “google spiders crawling for pages” thing didn’t really exist and a lot of them did it entirely manually.
Basically take a website homepage concept and apply it to your browser internet navigation. The portal would be how you search/navigate initially.
What, like the front page of Wikipedia? Just a bunch of links?
Think of it like a car dashboard with tons of information but 90% of is irrelevant. There’s a search (each one had very different results), there’s a weather widget, maybe some news headlines, maybe some suggested web pages or new ones. Stock market ticker, comic of the day, just throwing stuff at the wall because more features = better. Very cluttered and busy. Like early MySpace.
So google comes in and does three important things: comprehensive and consistent indexing coupled with an excellent search ranking system that was a decade ahead of everyone, and killed the clutter.
Ask Jeeves, Alta vista, etc. kind of cracked indexing as well but they just could not crack giving relevant results at such a consistent rate as Google. Until a couple of years ago almost no one ever looked at page 2 of search results on google, no matter how obscure the search. Your first 1-10 hits usually did it even in the early 2000’s. It was truly a marvel.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/best-websites-90s_n_2542393
If you go to AOL or Yahoo, they still have this kind of stuff. Dunno if there’s an actual market or if they’re just clinging to it in desperation.
Also check: https://www.compuserve.com/ owned by the same company.
It is the same site as https://isp.netscape.com/
I wonder what was in the cool Y2K survival kit.
I need to know!