The only reason I switched to Google at the end of the 90s was their site: Only a search box and a logo - all you need to search. Always disliked Yahoo, etc because of their waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay overloaded front pages.
And this covers one of the most important reasons Google won: The "portal" page. It was a terrible idea, throw a bunch of garbage content on the front page of a search engine and try to distract your users. Google kept it simple, which mattered when browsers didn't have a built-in search box and you actually had to go to the search engine page. (Yes, my browser DOES open to a blank page, it always has, the first thing I do is turn off the homepage when I install a browser.)
Bro Swirski I switched to google for the exact same reason. Then I started to find out how evil google really is and I discovered DuckDuckGo which has the same simple interface without the evil non-privacy issues. my home page is DuckDuckGo.
I remember using Altavista between the 90s and 2000s. Was really fast and accurate so I quite liked it and used it. I first saw my teacher opening Google and I looked at my school mate and we both asked "What's Google?"
I remember back in school, we were introduced to Ask Jeeves. The teacher introduced this to us as a way to search on the internet. The teacher even had us ask the question, "Why is the sky blue?" Was such a throwback watching this video. Thanks for the memories!
I actually remember what it was like back then... I don't miss it. Back then, I remember Altavista being the only search engine that was even remotely useful since it usually had a couple relevant results on the first or second page. This was way better than most other search engines, which could easily have NO relevant results unless you very carefully picked the right keywords to search for, and even then it was almost pure luck if you'd find anything useful. Keyword spam was a huge problem and most of the results from most search engines tended to be scam websites with huge lists of keywords fishing for search clicks, with no actual content. Google completely blew everything out of the water simply by being adequate. It was the first search engine that would reliably find multiple relevant results about 90% of the time.
My fav from 94-96 or so was Webcrawler, then Altavista, and finally Google. I think the winning formula for Google in those early days of crowded Portal Sites was that it remained light-weight, letting you quickly get a search text box, search, and be done. It surprises me that no one ever mentions that aspect of Google, especially since they seem to go out of their way to keep it that way.
Altavista's big and important feature that we sorely lack nowadays was it's result clustering so instead of 3 pages of the same crap results you could cut out swathes of duff results from multiple meanings with a couple of clicks. With Google you just have to learn what Google wants you to learn when they want you to
I know a video is more interesting, but if you really are interested on how file compression works, you might want to look for Huffman Coding and the Lempel-Ziv (LZ) algorithm(s).
Robin MGP Yahoo and ask have both made malicious toolbars that install when you're trying to get something else. The toolbars then track things that you do online and on your computer.
The first Yahoo server to leave the Stanford campus was an SGI Challenge S which sat under a grey folding table in the Netscape datacenter which was the only other company than HP to have a T3 data circuit provisioned in Silicon Valley. It cost $25K a month. It was a favor by NSCP to help out the research project.
In the early 2000s Yahoo was my internet provider and, by default, my search engine. There were quite a number of search engines I could use besides AskJeeves, simply by doing a Yahoo search for those search engines themselves, but as I recall, I never had to "select" Yahoo itself. It was just already there when I got logged into Yahoo. My problem was my computer frequently crashed, and then I had to re-load Yahoo from the CD they had sent me for that purpose. I think you could just get other IPs like AOL or Compuserve with a direct download because my computer had come with shortcuts for those IPs on the desktop.
I was born in 1983. It was pretty neat growing up with technology, and watching it evolve. And it restarted to peak just in time when highschool started. No RUclips or Google. We had Napster, limewire, free internet providers that kept going bankrupt, and we used to goof off in the computer lab downloading msdos games like Duke nukem. And the only kids that had cell phones, usually shared them with their siblings.
That company is still around. Though they left the consumer search market a long time ago. These days, they provide search solutions to more enterprise clients.
"definitely not evil" lol. I thought Ask was still around? I loved Altavista, you could search and download files with it too, as it allowed search by extension.
Archie did involve into a search engine (for anonymous ftp file names) with a search interface and multiple mirrors (a "cdn") around the world. I remember using it back when the web barely existed. Later I accessed both Archie and that gopher search engine via telnet+gopher.
I remember how back in the day, I would use Google for general searches, but when I had a specific question in mind, I would go to Ask, believing that Ask was more optimized to questions and Google to keywords.
I used Infoseek back in the day. I really loved that little startpage/portal they offered, where I could access email, news, weather, and search, all on one page.
Hey man I couldn't help but notice that your microphone has a lot of sibilance in your audio. I like your videos but the sibilance in your audio can get quite uncomfortable and I would like to offer a few suggestions: 1. Tilt the microphone 45 degrees and move back from the microphone a few inches. Try to talk across the diaphragm instead of into it. 2. use the default equalizer in your audio to eq out the sibilance which usually occurs in the higher frequencies (note unless you are well familiar with equalization this will be difficult and ineffective) 3. Use a Sibilace removal plugin. There are many around for basically every audio recording software under the sun and are quite effective. I hope you've found this helpful and that you can use these to improve the quality of your videos. Thanks for your time :)
You left out Northern Light and Webcrawler, both of which were what I used before I switched to Metacrawler, which automagically searched all the other search engines. edit: I also notice you didn't mention Betty, Veronica, and Jughead. And skipped over Gopher completely, which is kind of odd after mentioning Archie.
PageRank was definitely the key innovation; it's hard to convey now how miraculous it seemed. There were a lot of search engines out there, but they'd often have the link you really wanted buried on the fifth or sixth page of results under a pile of garbage. (That's why Google returns so many pages of results--it was expected behavior from a search engine because with the pre-Google engines like AltaVista, Infoseek or HotBot, you'd often have to go on a manual search expedition through all those pages. Google's "I'm Feeling Lucky" button was an advertisement implying that, unlike their competitors, their results ranking was so good, you could often trust them to just know what the single best link was.) There was another thing, too. AltaVista started out as a simple search bar in the middle of a mostly blank page. But by the time Google came out, its competitors had all expanded into "portals" full of Yahoo-like category listings, distracting widgets, news feeds and advertisements. Over the low-bandwidth dial-up connections of the time, they took a long time to load. Google, meanwhile, had an uncluttered front page that looked deliberately like AltaVista's original search interface. The messages was "we're cutting the crap; we know that when you go to a search engine, search is what you want." It's mildly ironic given the behemoth Google expanded into, but I give them credit for keeping that uncluttered front page around, even if most of the time people access Google in other ways now.
'Webcrawler' was the name of an early spider search site. We didn't call that sort of engine a 'crawler' back in the day, we called it a 'spider', because it searched the web. Calling it a 'crawler' now is kind of like how we now say 'google' instead of 'search'. Also, even though this video mentions Archie searching FTP, it totally skips over the gopher generation (pre-HTTP text sites, concurrent with FTP), which were searched by Veronica and WAIS (wide-area information search) servers.
I've always pictured "the dark web" as a shady alleyway where men in large overcoats stand in an ominous silence Hearing how it actually works would be very interesting
RetroChipette someone once compared the dark web as the the semi abandoned side of a city that has been left behind behind because of newer parts(surface web) of the city becoming the booming business side
Search engines _can_ interact with the deep web. It's just that engines like Google haven't programmed their crawlers to index sites which are only accessible by connecting to a site using certain database queries (as that would require bruteforcing all possible queries) and haven't programmed their crawlers to use certain encryption protocols (take .onion domains as an example) that many deep web sites use. Google also prioritises sites which have been linked more. This means a surface web results will always appear above a deep web result. There are search engines other than Google that have deep web crawlers, using a TOR gateway to connect to .onion domains. The belief that there is no search engine for the deep web is completely false. Even content only usually accessible by certain people - the best example of a deep web page - such as your personal email inbox, can be indexed as long as the URL gets out (providing it serves based at least somewhat on the content of a query). It's just that nobody will be able to use it in the same way as you due to a lack of cookies or login details.
Bear in mind that all a web crawler does is index every site it can possibly find using links. I'm sure anyone who's ever used the deep web knows how many link repositories there are. _It really wouldn't be hard to scrape the deep web for links._
Fun fact about "google:" It is not only synonymous with "internet searching" in English, but also in other languages. The linguistics of this is very fun. Take Japanese, for example, where you don't have the /l/ sound, and you can't end a word with a consonant, so the name "google" becomes ググル or guguru. Coincidently, Japanese verbs in their most basic form end with a suffix -u, so the word ends up sounding like a native Japanese verb. So what happens next? People start applying the typical verb endings to this new word. Replace the -u with -ta and follow the sound change rules of the language and you get ググった gugutta "googled," or you can have ググらない guguranai "don't google," ググっている gugutte iru "to be googling," ググっちゃう gugucchau "to regretfully google," and so forth. The way you write this verb reflects this fun fusion. In Japanese, recent borrowed words from English or other languages, foreign names or place names, etc, are usually written with the set of syllable characters known as katakana: トマト tomato ゲーム game, アメリカ America, etc. A native Japanese verb though will be written in the hiragana set of characters, or a mix of hiragana with kanji, or the Chinese characters: もらう to receive 食べる to eat. How do they write this new nativized loan word? By doing exactly what I've been doing: mixing katakana and hiragana! ググる Another language I know well is German, and they also took the word google and turned it into a German verb: googeln "to google." You can say "ich googele" (I google), or "er googelt" (he googles), or "wir haben gegoogelt" (we googled). And I think many other languages have done similar things. It's very fun.
Altavista is a search engine? In 2006, I had to do a project about O'Henry and a friend told me that it served as a good kind of encyclopedia, and so I went there. And found the info I needed. Huh.
Yup, loved Altavista in the mid to late 90's. Would try Ask Jeeves if Altavista didn't work. Never really liked Yahoo as it always seemed so spammy. It's a shame Ask is practically malware now. Great vid man
@@feynstein1004 It isnt collecting an absurd amount of private data like google or bing. Its hardly collecting anything at all. The bangs feature is also really useful, i like that you can easily switch between localized and non-localized search.
I still remember back when I was in 5th grade and we were using the school's computer lab. We used kid-friendly versions of search engines called "Yahooligans" and "Googopolis"
Nice subtle nod in the thumbnail. 😅 And I used Ask Jeeves sometime around 2000 I think? I preferred it over Yahoo, if I remember right. But whatever the most commonly site was, I remember me preferring Ask was this huge thing that freaked out my friends and computer lab teacher. 😂
Completely different technology. Search engines mostly operated over the world wide web in your web browser. BBS systems didn't actually use the internet at all. It was a grassroots network people created between each other's computers using their phone lines.
Along with Archie there were also Gopher search services called Veronica and Jughead. Also, there was WAIS (Wide Area Information Server). I never used these but I remember reading about them and thinking they were some kind of futuristic marvel.
Very Informative, I never thought I would find the early history of search browsers so entertaining let alone so educational, I see great things for your channel Science Elf.
Can I ask what the point of the 2:41 web wanderer was? You say it was to find and index all the webpages, but didn't offer a search... so what was this huge index for?
Surprised that WebCrawler wasn't mentioned. When I started on the web in the early 90s, it was the search engine of choice, until Alta Vista surpassed it a year or two later.
It's weird to think how differently "search" engines were used then. It used to be really difficult to get answers to searches phrased like real questions, even about basic facts. I remember too, like you point out, how when I was a kid Yahoo was really more of a "browse" engine where you weren't trying to answer a specific question or find a site for a specific company or product, but more like you were going through the categories randomly like you were tuning a radio in an unfamiliar town. "What are the 'humor' sites? What are the 'news' sites? What are the 'science' sites? What's popular?" You really didn't know what kind of stuff was where at even a basic level, and the internet was so much more in flux at the time, so your portal into finding what would become your regular sites to visit were those more curated engines. Now a lot of other things have replaced that kind of activity, like Wikipedia and Twitter and so on, but it seems kind of insane to just search a broad category like "jokes" or "video games" and then to click on nearly every single result looking for a gem. That's how I did it as a 90s kid learning to internet, though.
Many forgot how bad yahoo search had become, because they mixed sponsored results right in with general hits. You could go through three pages and still not find the valid data you were seeking. Though Google is imperfect, they used to clearly label the sponsored results, and their site caught on quickly.
I agree, Dogpile was kind of a big deal, even though it wasn't technically a search engine, it just combined the results from other search engines. But it's still historically relevant because it was a decent option back then.
Search was more fun before Google. Now, you get a handful of authority websites that spend a crapton of money on SEO/SEM/SMM and that's all you get in the search results because they game the system all day long and you can't write and optimize content to rank above those authority sites.
I love these "indie research" channels, they're so informative and interesting! "What I've Learned" is another one with similar video format (if Science Elf doesn't mind me advertising similar channel :) ). I also had the pleasure to experience everything talked about in this video back in 1998. Altavista was indeed my favorite, it always returned useful results. I refused to use Google even until 2007 or so before Altavista lost its edge and became obsolete. I tried to use Yahoo too, but search results didn't seem relevant to me, so I stopped trying it. Yahoo's other services were useful though, like Yahoo Music that allowed watching music videos on Internet before RUclips.
I remember using Yahoo in 1993. It was just one big directory and I don’t think it allowed you to do a search. Lycos was around at the same time and was a little bit more useful. But back in those days there were a lot of really good websites to visit. A lot of the good content was on something called network news forums. I also remember Alta Vista being the first reliable search engine. Even so to do a comprehensive search you would check Alta vista, yahoo and maybe something else. Then I saw on breakfast tv something called Google and never looked back. Bing might be just as good but I do feel compelled to use it.
It's funny, the Internet as we know it and Google as we know it really isn't that old. For all of us who remember those other search engines, it feels like a lot more time passed than it actually did.
SnakeBerry like with Bing, the duckduckgo app is to slow, I want searching things to be fast the Google app opens instantly and loads in seconds typically in 1 sec. Duckduckgo and Bing are just slower and more clunky. Id probably use Bing and duckduckgo more often if there apps where better.
DuckDuckGo is still not quite up to par with Google's algorithms for finding / delivering relevant results and doesn't do Google's embedding of certain stats or features without even having to leave the results page as often, but does work fine in place of Google for about 85% of queries (not bad for a company that obviously has exponentially less resources compared to Google) and I typically use DuckDuckGo first before going to Google if I'm not satisfied with the results.
I've known of DuckDuckGo for years but only been using it primarily for about 8 months. I've found the web results flawless but the image search is lacking, half the time I have to scroll through several pages to find an image on DuckDuckGo that's one of the first results on Google Images.
I remember back in school we had to learn all about the different Search Engines and what one does better than the other and stuff like that. Time well spent i say :P
One major factor in Google's rise not mentioned here-- Google early on issued their (in)famous corporate motto, "Don't be evil," but it's important to realize why they felt they had to state that to begin with. AltaVista didn't just accept ads in search results, but actually accepted payment to improve results, polluting their quality. They didn't even feel it was necessary to identify which results were from ads. Other engines at the time were experimenting with doing something similar, in an effort to squeeze money out of a crowded space. The first aspect of Google's motto of "don't be evil" was, ultimately, intended as a declaration that, while they would eventually include ads in results, they would clearly identify those items as ads, not the actual results. While their definition of what "clearly" means has changed since the time when ads would have a colored box and background, clearly setting them off from the rest of the page, it remains that, to our knowledge at least, Google doesn't accept payment to put a webpage at the top of the results--just, above them, with the small italicized word "Promoted" nearby.
While not a search engine I would have liked to see a reference to WebFerret, a small program that ran locally, gathered, sorted and displayed results from all of the major search engines of the day. It also did one other thing that none of the current search engines did back then, it put what I was looking for near or at the top of its results listing.
The only reason I switched to Google at the end of the 90s was their site: Only a search box and a logo - all you need to search. Always disliked Yahoo, etc because of their waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay overloaded front pages.
And this covers one of the most important reasons Google won: The "portal" page.
It was a terrible idea, throw a bunch of garbage content on the front page of a search engine and try to distract your users. Google kept it simple, which mattered when browsers didn't have a built-in search box and you actually had to go to the search engine page.
(Yes, my browser DOES open to a blank page, it always has, the first thing I do is turn off the homepage when I install a browser.)
How do you turn off the homepage to your browser? I'd love to know.
Adventurer32 It's quite easy to find in the options. If not, just Google it.
+Adventurer32 you turn it off by setting the homepage to about://blank or chrome://blank for chromium based browsers
Bro Swirski I switched to google for the exact same reason. Then I started to find out how evil google really is and I discovered DuckDuckGo which has the same simple interface without the evil non-privacy issues. my home page is DuckDuckGo.
D E F I N I T E L Y N O T E V I L
D E F I N I T E L Y N O T A E S T H E T I C
I thought that phrase was a bit of an anachronism.
He's just trying not to get demonetize.
"Tell me who you are afraid to offend, and I'll tell you who your master is."
--Voltaire
@@Sheikh_Speare F I N A L L Y I G E T A R E S P O N S E F R O M Y O U : L A W N M O W E R M A N;)
A A A A A A A A A A H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H
I remember using Altavista between the 90s and 2000s. Was really fast and accurate so I quite liked it and used it. I first saw my teacher opening Google and I looked at my school mate and we both asked "What's Google?"
Came for the history of ask, stayed for the smooth jazz
I remember back in school, we were introduced to Ask Jeeves. The teacher introduced this to us as a way to search on the internet. The teacher even had us ask the question, "Why is the sky blue?" Was such a throwback watching this video. Thanks for the memories!
I actually remember what it was like back then... I don't miss it.
Back then, I remember Altavista being the only search engine that was even remotely useful since it usually had a couple relevant results on the first or second page. This was way better than most other search engines, which could easily have NO relevant results unless you very carefully picked the right keywords to search for, and even then it was almost pure luck if you'd find anything useful. Keyword spam was a huge problem and most of the results from most search engines tended to be scam websites with huge lists of keywords fishing for search clicks, with no actual content.
Google completely blew everything out of the water simply by being adequate. It was the first search engine that would reliably find multiple relevant results about 90% of the time.
There was also a period of time where a good portion of results would be x-rated links. =/
That's what it's like today!!!!!!!!!!! What do you MEAN, "...what it Was like..."?
And there's how the webs was won
My fav from 94-96 or so was Webcrawler, then Altavista, and finally Google.
I think the winning formula for Google in those early days of crowded Portal Sites was that it remained light-weight, letting you quickly get a search text box, search, and be done.
It surprises me that no one ever mentions that aspect of Google, especially since they seem to go out of their way to keep it that way.
"Kraft singles in your area" hahaha nice one
Cadger Christmas Light Show hahaha nice comment
Yeah that got me good the first time I saw it
Hey i'd visit these Kraft singles
That joke was really cheesy.
@@prismstudios001 Don't be square!
Altavista used to be really good, i remember using that at school when i was younger.
same
Getting lost in the sea of information is what made pre google internet amazing
4:02 Lycos, Excite, and HotBot still bring back memories of Internet Explorer 3.
Who noticed all of the Bonzi Buddy Jokes?
Alpha Destroyer 32768 the what?
where
yeah
This was really interesting
Hey what's up man? Yeah I'm kinda addicted to RUclips haha
Thanks man! It's actually my birthday so I'm having a good time. Cool to run into you here :)
65 Drums this makes no sense are you talking to yourself
possibly whoever he was talking to deleted his account or messages
Altavista's big and important feature that we sorely lack nowadays was it's result clustering so instead of 3 pages of the same crap results you could cut out swathes of duff results from multiple meanings with a couple of clicks. With Google you just have to learn what Google wants you to learn when they want you to
Can you make a video about file compression?
yo lmao i know you from cppses
FeaR Moabs lol
I know a video is more interesting, but if you really are interested on how file compression works, you might want to look for Huffman Coding and the Lempel-Ziv (LZ) algorithm(s).
Yeah lzh and others
My Amiga 500 used to take hours to compress a small file
Some of those names, of defunct search engines, are certainly a blast from the past!
"Definitely not evil"
I don't think I ever really used search engines till the early 2000's . I was stuck with Microsoft Encarta growing up. A disk based encyclopedia
And now Ask and Yahoo are pretty much viruses.
Robin MGP Yahoo and ask have both made malicious toolbars that install when you're trying to get something else. The toolbars then track things that you do online and on your computer.
I used to use ask lmao
Robin MGP The fact that you need to take precaution while using them, is a sign of a scummy business.
Google tracks you also... why I use DuckDuckGo
My mom uses Yahoo! Nothing happened
The first Yahoo server to leave the Stanford campus was an SGI Challenge S which sat under a grey folding table in the Netscape datacenter which was the only other company than HP to have a T3 data circuit provisioned in Silicon Valley. It cost $25K a month. It was a favor by NSCP to help out the research project.
In the early 2000s Yahoo was my internet provider and, by default, my search engine. There were quite a number of search engines I could use besides AskJeeves, simply by doing a Yahoo search for those search engines themselves, but as I recall, I never had to "select" Yahoo itself. It was just already there when I got logged into Yahoo. My problem was my computer frequently crashed, and then I had to re-load Yahoo from the CD they had sent me for that purpose. I think you could just get other IPs like AOL or Compuserve with a direct download because my computer had come with shortcuts for those IPs on the desktop.
I was born in 1983. It was pretty neat growing up with technology, and watching it evolve. And it restarted to peak just in time when highschool started. No RUclips or Google. We had Napster, limewire, free internet providers that kept going bankrupt, and we used to goof off in the computer lab downloading msdos games like Duke nukem. And the only kids that had cell phones, usually shared them with their siblings.
i use duckduckgo for the school computers
Cyaniden Get a proxy on hideme
It is free
Or a free VPN
Quack 🦆
Good choice.
Now we have search with Bing.
Who would've imagined.
"Page Rank" is basically the same reason shit on youtube is becoming "popular" and "top content" today, because Google can't fix it's shortcomings?
I remember there was a search engine called Northernlight
That company is still around. Though they left the consumer search market a long time ago. These days, they provide search solutions to more enterprise clients.
Used it quite a bit in the day
"definitely not evil" lol.
I thought Ask was still around?
I loved Altavista, you could search and download files with it too, as it allowed search by extension.
@Maverick Hunter K
Oh, YEAH! I forgot about that. I found so many rare Dragon Ball songs that way. XD
You make it sound like you can't do that anymore. Google allows search by extension...
Ask is still around, however, they don't use their own database. They borrow eother Google's or Microsoft's.
Archie did involve into a search engine (for anonymous ftp file names) with a search interface and multiple mirrors (a "cdn") around the world. I remember using it back when the web barely existed. Later I accessed both Archie and that gopher search engine via telnet+gopher.
I remember how back in the day, I would use Google for general searches, but when I had a specific question in mind, I would go to Ask, believing that Ask was more optimized to questions and Google to keywords.
Cubester64 It actually was. And Google has gotten incrementally worse after they stopped listening (except when not talking to them).
I used Infoseek back in the day. I really loved that little startpage/portal they offered, where I could access email, news, weather, and search, all on one page.
Hey man I couldn't help but notice that your microphone has a lot of sibilance in your audio. I like your videos but the sibilance in your audio can get quite uncomfortable and I would like to offer a few suggestions:
1. Tilt the microphone 45 degrees and move back from the microphone a few inches. Try to talk across the diaphragm instead of into it.
2. use the default equalizer in your audio to eq out the sibilance which usually occurs in the higher frequencies (note unless you are well familiar with equalization this will be difficult and ineffective)
3. Use a Sibilace removal plugin. There are many around for basically every audio recording software under the sun and are quite effective.
I hope you've found this helpful and that you can use these to improve the quality of your videos. Thanks for your time :)
"Bonzi Software" Ohhh boi...
You left out Northern Light and Webcrawler, both of which were what I used before I switched to Metacrawler, which automagically searched all the other search engines.
edit: I also notice you didn't mention Betty, Veronica, and Jughead. And skipped over Gopher completely, which is kind of odd after mentioning Archie.
NoJusticeNoPeace - Yes! I did pretty much the same with Webcrawler, then Metacrawler
Is metacrawler safer than the other search engines. I mean does they keep your privacy and don't track you?
I will not let anyone live down the name Jeeves.
It's too funny to not.
RIP Jeeves. They robbed is of him.
I remember using HotBot before Google! That was back in high school.
Yay! One of my favorite youtubers posted, and as usual, it was entertaining and informative. Thanks, man!
*Hears “AltaVista*
*Tears of pure nostalgia ensue*
PageRank was definitely the key innovation; it's hard to convey now how miraculous it seemed. There were a lot of search engines out there, but they'd often have the link you really wanted buried on the fifth or sixth page of results under a pile of garbage. (That's why Google returns so many pages of results--it was expected behavior from a search engine because with the pre-Google engines like AltaVista, Infoseek or HotBot, you'd often have to go on a manual search expedition through all those pages. Google's "I'm Feeling Lucky" button was an advertisement implying that, unlike their competitors, their results ranking was so good, you could often trust them to just know what the single best link was.)
There was another thing, too. AltaVista started out as a simple search bar in the middle of a mostly blank page. But by the time Google came out, its competitors had all expanded into "portals" full of Yahoo-like category listings, distracting widgets, news feeds and advertisements. Over the low-bandwidth dial-up connections of the time, they took a long time to load. Google, meanwhile, had an uncluttered front page that looked deliberately like AltaVista's original search interface. The messages was "we're cutting the crap; we know that when you go to a search engine, search is what you want." It's mildly ironic given the behemoth Google expanded into, but I give them credit for keeping that uncluttered front page around, even if most of the time people access Google in other ways now.
'Webcrawler' was the name of an early spider search site. We didn't call that sort of engine a 'crawler' back in the day, we called it a 'spider', because it searched the web. Calling it a 'crawler' now is kind of like how we now say 'google' instead of 'search'.
Also, even though this video mentions Archie searching FTP, it totally skips over the gopher generation (pre-HTTP text sites, concurrent with FTP), which were searched by Veronica and WAIS (wide-area information search) servers.
Me: Sounds easy enough. Me: *searches before google in google*
6:58 That alert at the top is something you get when you have Bonzi Buddy installed.
whatever poor soul took this screenshot back then had bonzi buddy
YOUR COMPUTER IS INFECTED WITH VIRUSES!!!!
DOWNLOAD INTERNETALERT '99 NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Very interesting to see the evolution of all of these search methods. Nice vid!
A sequel video explaining how the dark web works, and why search engines cannot interact with it could be interesting? ;o
I've always pictured "the dark web" as a shady alleyway where men in large overcoats stand in an ominous silence
Hearing how it actually works would be very interesting
RetroChipette someone once compared the dark web as the the semi abandoned side of a city that has been left behind behind because of newer parts(surface web) of the city becoming the booming business side
That's an even better way to describe it actually. Thank you for sharing!
Search engines _can_ interact with the deep web. It's just that engines like Google haven't programmed their crawlers to index sites which are only accessible by connecting to a site using certain database queries (as that would require bruteforcing all possible queries) and haven't programmed their crawlers to use certain encryption protocols (take .onion domains as an example) that many deep web sites use.
Google also prioritises sites which have been linked more. This means a surface web results will always appear above a deep web result.
There are search engines other than Google that have deep web crawlers, using a TOR gateway to connect to .onion domains. The belief that there is no search engine for the deep web is completely false.
Even content only usually accessible by certain people - the best example of a deep web page - such as your personal email inbox, can be indexed as long as the URL gets out (providing it serves based at least somewhat on the content of a query). It's just that nobody will be able to use it in the same way as you due to a lack of cookies or login details.
Bear in mind that all a web crawler does is index every site it can possibly find using links. I'm sure anyone who's ever used the deep web knows how many link repositories there are. _It really wouldn't be hard to scrape the deep web for links._
Fun fact about "google:" It is not only synonymous with "internet searching" in English, but also in other languages.
The linguistics of this is very fun. Take Japanese, for example, where you don't have the /l/ sound, and you can't end a word with a consonant, so the name "google" becomes ググル or guguru. Coincidently, Japanese verbs in their most basic form end with a suffix -u, so the word ends up sounding like a native Japanese verb.
So what happens next? People start applying the typical verb endings to this new word. Replace the -u with -ta and follow the sound change rules of the language and you get ググった gugutta "googled," or you can have ググらない guguranai "don't google," ググっている gugutte iru "to be googling," ググっちゃう gugucchau "to regretfully google," and so forth.
The way you write this verb reflects this fun fusion. In Japanese, recent borrowed words from English or other languages, foreign names or place names, etc, are usually written with the set of syllable characters known as katakana: トマト tomato ゲーム game, アメリカ America, etc. A native Japanese verb though will be written in the hiragana set of characters, or a mix of hiragana with kanji, or the Chinese characters: もらう to receive 食べる to eat. How do they write this new nativized loan word? By doing exactly what I've been doing: mixing katakana and hiragana! ググる
Another language I know well is German, and they also took the word google and turned it into a German verb: googeln "to google." You can say "ich googele" (I google), or "er googelt" (he googles), or "wir haben gegoogelt" (we googled).
And I think many other languages have done similar things. It's very fun.
I always look forward to your videos, you don't upload too much but when you do it makes it well worth the wait.
Don't you hate when you're trying to Google something very specific but don't know how to word it?
This video doesn't have a 360p setting for me. Just thought that was interesting.
I once found a video with a jump to 360p-720p
I have a 360p setting.
Mr Videos & Games Interesting.
Huh
Your screen must have an 144p or 240p resolution...
Great video mate, i remember using yahoo, back in the day.
It was better than Google for awhile.
same
Hah! I remember FTP, then Prodigy, Excite, AltaVista, Ask and the original Yahoo list. That just shows my age.
and i don't chuckle
You didn't mention WebCrawler which is the oldest surviving search engine on the web today.
Altavista is a search engine? In 2006, I had to do a project about O'Henry and a friend told me that it served as a good kind of encyclopedia, and so I went there. And found the info I needed. Huh.
D.E.C is usually just pronounced "Deck".
Always excited when I see a new video from this channel
no mentioning of Mosaic, Netscape ???
Very nicely done
Definitely not evil...ehem. So you swallowed their marketing pill.
The Bonzi Buddy references are killing me 😂😂
My first search engine experience: Infoseek.
Yup, loved Altavista in the mid to late 90's. Would try Ask Jeeves if Altavista didn't work. Never really liked Yahoo as it always seemed so spammy. It's a shame Ask is practically malware now. Great vid man
I can still type altavista about as fast as google. And now with tabs duckduckgo is the better choice for what should be very apparent reasons.
Stygian Doll ...tabs?
What are these apparent reasons? I'm genuinely curious.
@@feynstein1004 It isnt collecting an absurd amount of private data like google or bing.
Its hardly collecting anything at all.
The bangs feature is also really useful, i like that you can easily switch between localized and non-localized search.
I still remember back when I was in 5th grade and we were using the school's computer lab. We used kid-friendly versions of search engines called "Yahooligans" and "Googopolis"
Nice subtle nod in the thumbnail. 😅 And I used Ask Jeeves sometime around 2000 I think? I preferred it over Yahoo, if I remember right. But whatever the most commonly site was, I remember me preferring Ask was this huge thing that freaked out my friends and computer lab teacher. 😂
I'm a weirdo, who uses DDG, Qwant and Bing.
I think the key to Google's success it that no-one really knows how it works, because you can't cheat if you don't know the rules
What made me initially choose Google over the other ones was it's spartan search page. Just a text box, button, and the Google logo.
What about BBS? Gopher? Usenet?
Completely different technology. Search engines mostly operated over the world wide web in your web browser. BBS systems didn't actually use the internet at all. It was a grassroots network people created between each other's computers using their phone lines.
Love this! Could you do a video of music streaming before Spotify and Apple Music? Like go from limewire to Grooveshark.
moviemagic up
Along with Archie there were also Gopher search services called Veronica and Jughead.
Also, there was WAIS (Wide Area Information Server). I never used these but I remember reading about them and thinking they were some kind of futuristic marvel.
Fun fact: PageRank is called PageRank because the guy who made it's last name was Page.
Very Informative, I never thought I would find the early history of search browsers so entertaining let alone so educational, I see great things for your channel Science Elf.
Can I ask what the point of the 2:41 web wanderer was? You say it was to find and index all the webpages, but didn't offer a search... so what was this huge index for?
i like how you left out Bing because no one uses Bing (unless you're Microsoft)
Surprised that WebCrawler wasn't mentioned. When I started on the web in the early 90s, it was the search engine of choice, until Alta Vista surpassed it a year or two later.
The fifteen dislikes were probably yahoo users
I remember using Archie to do FTP searches. There was also a search engine called Veronica that used the Gopher protocol. Damn, I'm old.
It's weird to think how differently "search" engines were used then. It used to be really difficult to get answers to searches phrased like real questions, even about basic facts. I remember too, like you point out, how when I was a kid Yahoo was really more of a "browse" engine where you weren't trying to answer a specific question or find a site for a specific company or product, but more like you were going through the categories randomly like you were tuning a radio in an unfamiliar town. "What are the 'humor' sites? What are the 'news' sites? What are the 'science' sites? What's popular?" You really didn't know what kind of stuff was where at even a basic level, and the internet was so much more in flux at the time, so your portal into finding what would become your regular sites to visit were those more curated engines. Now a lot of other things have replaced that kind of activity, like Wikipedia and Twitter and so on, but it seems kind of insane to just search a broad category like "jokes" or "video games" and then to click on nearly every single result looking for a gem. That's how I did it as a 90s kid learning to internet, though.
Many forgot how bad yahoo search had become, because they mixed sponsored results right in with general hits. You could go through three pages and still not find the valid data you were seeking. Though Google is imperfect, they used to clearly label the sponsored results, and their site caught on quickly.
I now want to know what will be around post google (or search engines in general) for navigating the internet
i have to tell you, your videos make me feel a lot relaxed!
Alright, it apparently has about 6,300,000,000 results which is cool
Fxguyfrguiushuhshjhshusihshubsug
First time seeing his comment with 1 goddamn like
There is another search engine called Ecosia.
not a single mention of Dogpile? come on.
FrogLungs Shitpile more like it 💩
I agree, Dogpile was kind of a big deal, even though it wasn't technically a search engine, it just combined the results from other search engines. But it's still historically relevant because it was a decent option back then.
@@Humbird00 It's a meta-engine then.
Search was more fun before Google. Now, you get a handful of authority websites that spend a crapton of money on SEO/SEM/SMM and that's all you get in the search results because they game the system all day long and you can't write and optimize content to rank above those authority sites.
9:00 "Definitely not evil."
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
It knows more about you then you yourself know.
I love these "indie research" channels, they're so informative and interesting! "What I've Learned" is another one with similar video format (if Science Elf doesn't mind me advertising similar channel :) ).
I also had the pleasure to experience everything talked about in this video back in 1998. Altavista was indeed my favorite, it always returned useful results. I refused to use Google even until 2007 or so before Altavista lost its edge and became obsolete. I tried to use Yahoo too, but search results didn't seem relevant to me, so I stopped trying it. Yahoo's other services were useful though, like Yahoo Music that allowed watching music videos on Internet before RUclips.
I am getting old. I can remember using Gopher to search the internet in the days before the WEB
Nice analysis! I remember when Lycos & Altavista were the stuff.
I remember using Yahoo in 1993. It was just one big directory and I don’t think it allowed you to do a search. Lycos was around at the same time and was a little bit more useful. But back in those days there were a lot of really good websites to visit. A lot of the good content was on something called network news forums.
I also remember Alta Vista being the first reliable search engine. Even so to do a comprehensive search you would check Alta vista, yahoo and maybe something else. Then I saw on breakfast tv something called Google and never looked back. Bing might be just as good but I do feel compelled to use it.
I always used WebCrawler, which is still around today.
Altavista was my go-to search engine back in the day. Astalavista was my go-to crack search engine. ;)
there is a saying in Urdu(Pakistani language) Dair Aaye Drust Aaye meaning arrived late but arrived the right way. fits on google...
Well done! Thanks for the trip down memory lane...
It's funny, the Internet as we know it and Google as we know it really isn't that old. For all of us who remember those other search engines, it feels like a lot more time passed than it actually did.
Duckduckgo got suprisingly better through the years and I end up using it as my current one.
SnakeBerry like with Bing, the duckduckgo app is to slow, I want searching things to be fast the Google app opens instantly and loads in seconds typically in 1 sec. Duckduckgo and Bing are just slower and more clunky. Id probably use Bing and duckduckgo more often if there apps where better.
Poble Look in your privacy policy you never read you lazy fuck.
Poble not an argument
DuckDuckGo is still not quite up to par with Google's algorithms for finding / delivering relevant results and doesn't do Google's embedding of certain stats or features without even having to leave the results page as often, but does work fine in place of Google for about 85% of queries (not bad for a company that obviously has exponentially less resources compared to Google) and I typically use DuckDuckGo first before going to Google if I'm not satisfied with the results.
I've known of DuckDuckGo for years but only been using it primarily for about 8 months. I've found the web results flawless but the image search is lacking, half the time I have to scroll through several pages to find an image on DuckDuckGo that's one of the first results on Google Images.
I remember back in school we had to learn all about the different Search Engines and what one does better than the other and stuff like that. Time well spent i say :P
One major factor in Google's rise not mentioned here--
Google early on issued their (in)famous corporate motto, "Don't be evil," but it's important to realize why they felt they had to state that to begin with.
AltaVista didn't just accept ads in search results, but actually accepted payment to improve results, polluting their quality. They didn't even feel it was necessary to identify which results were from ads. Other engines at the time were experimenting with doing something similar, in an effort to squeeze money out of a crowded space.
The first aspect of Google's motto of "don't be evil" was, ultimately, intended as a declaration that, while they would eventually include ads in results, they would clearly identify those items as ads, not the actual results. While their definition of what "clearly" means has changed since the time when ads would have a colored box and background, clearly setting them off from the rest of the page, it remains that, to our knowledge at least, Google doesn't accept payment to put a webpage at the top of the results--just, above them, with the small italicized word "Promoted" nearby.
If I go on www.altavista.com now, it sends me to Yahoo. Were they bought? Did something else happen?
While not a search engine I would have liked to see a reference to WebFerret, a small program that ran locally, gathered, sorted and displayed results from all of the major search engines of the day. It also did one other thing that none of the current search engines did back then, it put what I was looking for near or at the top of its results listing.
Mario: Yahoo!
Luigi: Google!
omg this is exactly the types of channels i love
I remember people telling me "Why are you using google, We've set Yahoo as the default search engine for a reason."