HACKER Q&A
📣 hopa

What was the initial reaction to search engines?


My manager the other day mentioned AI reminds him of when search engines like google were first popularized, whereas before you needed a lot of specialized knowledge that was hard to acquire, whereas after knowing obscure details became less important and knowing what to search for became more important. I’m curious for anyone who remembers - what was the reaction / discourse around search engines at the time? Was there a similar reaction to the rise of LLMs?

  👤 taubek Accepted Answer ✓
Somewhat. I remember that I was using Archie for finding files that were distributed via FTP. We had directories like Yahoo or DMOZ. At that time directories were the starting points for me. Internet seemed large, but not infinite.

For searching there was Altavista, Lycos, Hotbot, … Ask Jeeves was something that tried to be more that search engine. You had a feeling that now you can find all of the info and files on Internet. Google wasn’t the first one out there but it seems to me that it is the only one that survived.

👤 pseingatl
No one knew how they could be monetized. The original idea was that they had to be curated: Yahoo led the way into grouping sites into categories. Later came Altavista and others. Again, the infrastructure was expensive and no one knew how all that could be paid for. Google's founders, while still at Stanford, released a picture of a server sitting on a table. That was Google. Later, someone figured out that search equals advertising and that's how search was monetized. At first, local search was useless and newspapers and other legacy media could have hung on to that slice. But Google got better and better...
👤 turtleyacht
Took search for granted. It was such an early Internet before Google. "Surfing" and "downloading" were concepts to learn. Dial-up required a credit card.

LLMs are this generation's search, but I don't remember search being so reviled. Search opened a door to possibilities. If search were so resisted back then, it would have been a project to recreate the implementation. What did I know back then?

It may have paid off in terms of what is learned making a game versus playing one.

I just accepted search as the thing to do.