Remembering the pre-Google web, when search was an experiment
摘要
20世纪90年代中期，网络内容激增，但信息检索极为困难。彼时的搜索引擎如AltaVista、Lycos、Excite等，各有其独特的功能与缺陷，旨在驯服网络的无序。与如今谷歌作为门户和守门人的地位不同，早期搜索并非唯一入口，而是与目录、书签、新闻组等共同构成发现信息的生态系统。早期引擎并非劣质，而是反映了当时不同的互联网形态：人工目录仍具竞争力，爬虫技术尚处
In the mid-'90s, the web was exploding, but finding anything of actual value on it felt like an elaborate negotiation with whatever proto-search engine happened to be standing closest to the door. Unlike now, when Google is widely seen as both portal and gatekeeper, sites like AltaVista, Lycos, Excite, HotBot, and Ask Jeeves promised to tame the chaos, each with its own suite of quirks, charms, and flaws.
The real story of pre-Google search is not that early engines were inferior. It's that they reflected a different Internet entirely, one where directories mattered, crawling was still an art, ranking was fragile, and the idea of “search” had not yet hardened into a single dominant interface.
A different kind of web
The first thing to remember about the pre-Google Internet is that there was no built-in assumption that you could search for everything. Many users found pages through Yahoo-style directories, bookmarks, newsgroups, email signatures, and links from site to site because the web was still small enough that human organization could compete with machine indexing. It was an era of Wild West-style discoverability. Search engines existed, but they were only one part of a larger ecosystem that blended curation and accident.
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