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by WaitWaitWha·5y ago·view on hn ↗
Hmmm... That is not how I remember it.

I could gopher topics by early 90's, and Infoseek, Yahoo, WebCrawler, etc. were a full text search of pages by mid 90's.

I distinctly recall searching usenet across multiple servers.

Even before this, when data only flowed through uucp (or Fido), search was albeit queued, readily available.

Your mileage may have varied; i just want to be clear that it was not that it did not exist, but new-comers would have a steeper learning curve. Today, it is expected, nay, demanded as a human right to be able to search the entire internet from a uniform and single klick search box. (yes, old crotchety, "in my day..." :) )

(edit: misspelurating stuffage)

8 comments
> I could gopher topics by early 90's

So you weren't a normal, mainstream, new user to the internet. You knew how to use it, you knew where to go to search.

I was the same in the 90s (minus Gopher skills), I learned about Yahoo, Altavista, Infoseek, etc. and became a wizard to my friends and some relatives because I could find things on the internet, didn't need to know the website address beforehand or click somewhere in AOL.

It did exist, it just wasn't accessible and generally available, nor it was a tool people knew how to use.

So domain names up to the early 2000s were pretty important to capture the mainstream market, not the Gophers.

Actually that was very normal for a new Internet user of the time. In the early 90's there was no web as far as the public was concerned so Yahoo (1994)/Altavista (1995)/Infoseek (1994) did not exist yet. For users of the pre-1993/1994 Internet, to use it you had to learn a hodge-podge of protocols and software including UUCP, gopher, FTP, telnet, NNTP etc. since that was the Internet back then. It wasn't until online services like AOL started providing web gateways (1995/6?) when 'normal' people really started flooding onto the 'net and it took a few years longer before there were useful web frontends for the majority of services.
And it's been September ever since
Imho the September was really kicked into overdrive with smartphone and mobile Internet adoption facilitating the social media hype.

Prior to that people would at least need to sit down and dedicate attention to whatever they were doing online at their desktop.

It required at least some technical base knowledge.

While nowadays pretty much everybody can, and will, pull out their smartphone even during very short breaks: It' all short attention span, relegated to devices were multi-tasking is way more of an hassle, which means people are also way less likely to do research on whatever they are discussing.

It's gotten to a point where in many places writing anything longer than Tweet length is considered something bad, as most peoples attention span just can't cope with long-form forum posts anymore.

I remember my school ran a contest where you had to find obscure information on the net. Things like when the inventor of the saxophone was born? You had to submit an URL so using the library was not an option. It was insanely hard, nowadays it's just one wikipedia click away.
The fact that you had even heard of gopher would have put you in a very small minority of internet users once dial-up internet access become relatively accessible (so, post-1995ish or so).
As a smart but not necessarily brilliant teenager getting on the web in mid-late 90s- Maybe Christmas 1996 I- well my family really- got a computer that could get on the internet, search engines were mediocre at best. I did have a family friend come over who was an old hand at the internet and knew all the tricks of the day- using operators like AND, OR, NEAR, NOT etc- and he was able to yield much higher quality results, but I was personally never able to replicate his abilities.

Google and Pagerank changed all that, but up until then, it was all very tricky and each search engine had its niche- Yahoo with its directory, Ask Jeeves had a user friendly interface, lycos and altavista had some niches of their own as well that I can't quite recall- or maybe they just each had brief shining moments in the sun. At one point I had desktop software that was a meta crawler that would enter a query into each one. The full text searches on keywords that may or may not really be relevant to what you wanted were really not all that good.

My favorite search engine at the time was Dogpile. It was a meta search engine that probably did much the same as your desktop software. Usually I could get relevant results out of it more quickly than using individual search engines.
Yes, the earliest directories / search engines worked extremely well in large part because there minimal content. When there where 7 knitting websites they don’t need to worry about SEO. It was only after the users started getting hundreds of results for most searches that search engines needed to worry about filtering and prioritization.
Here's a great example of why search engines started using more sophisticated examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_Google_bombs_in_the_...

People started to understand how PageRank worked, and managed to get George W. Bush's official biography page at whitehouse.gov to the top of the search for "miserable failure." As I recall, this worked until at least 2008, maybe a couple years past that.

Whoops. s/examples/algorithms/
There were manual indexes for sure, but my very first experience with the web was someone excitedly showing me how they could dial in, open this web browser thing, and then... nothing, because they didn't know any websites.

We typed in a few things, but it didn't go anywhere.

I remember he called the browser a "web crawler", which was probably the search engine someone told him to use to find sites. We had no idea.

Otherwise, I have a lot of memories exploring the web by typing in words followed by TLDs and writing down the interesting ones. It was another year or two before aggregators cropped up, copying and returning the first ten results of any manual index.

I don't remember how I discovered my first web site, but it might have been from a computer magazine at the time. Later, I would use Yahoo! as my search engine, eventually switching to Google.
I find it funny that you mention half a dozen ways to search the web and everyone seems to be focusing on just gopher because that is the only thing they can explain away. Google must have dug up Steve Jobs reality distortion field.
another issue I don't see talked about much in these comments is trust. Amazon had to develop a name that people could trust. I remember when people would agonize on whether to make a purchase because they were afraid they would be scammed.
That wasn't the average user and not even the average computer geek. Most browsed webrings.