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.
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.