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"Yes, There IS A Better Search Engine" - 10 Years Ago!

archive.salon.com — In an age where Go.com was new, and the Netscape and Yahoo Portals ruled the Web, one start-up company "with the unlikely name of Google.com" is showing the way. Salon.com in December of 1998 produced one of the first ever reviews or for that fact, mentions of Google.com still around on the internet today.

Who dugg this? Made popular Feb 17, 2008

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  • Easty, on 02/17/2008, -4/+784Okay. Does it creep anyone else out a little that 'ten years ago' refers to 1998?
    TIME SHOULDN'T WORK LIKE THAT, DAMNIT.
  • tfrans, on 02/17/2008, -6/+21310 years ago, if I said "Google it", you'd probably punch me in the face and break my glasses.
  • johndoughy, on 02/17/2008, -3/+208Dude I'm only 20, and I'm so with you! I seriously screamed "1998 was TEN YEARS AGO?!" in my house the other day.
  • 10goto10, on 02/17/2008, -2/+159Ah, 1998... when short articles didn't fit on one page and had to be divided up over more. Glad those times are over.
  • chris9902, on 02/17/2008, -6/+141"I'm not an Internet investor myself"

    but if you were you'd be a billionaire by now. lesson learned.
  • Borgcube, on 02/17/2008, -1/+132I know. First time I read the title, I though "Hmm, 10 years, so that's in '91 or something? Wait, why does it say '98?"
  • HenvY, on 02/17/2008, -6/+135I need a time masheen to go back and get me some google stock.
  • doshindude, on 02/17/2008, -1/+124I always thought 10 years ago was 1990....WTF is happening??? I want time to go backward.
  • goerg, on 02/17/2008, -1/+112you are so damn right...
  • inactive, on 02/17/2008, -1/+110you're all babies of babies. i invented the internet.i threw stones at my tree house. i called them 'packets'.
  • foovo, on 02/17/2008, -8/+105What happens when you google google? "You CAN BREAK the internet"
  • rockandrollmark, on 02/17/2008, -1/+89www.google.com? I'll have to try that one out.
  • sdellboy, on 02/17/2008, -2/+79Look what else happened in 1998:

    January 26 - Lewinsky scandal: On American television, President Bill Clinton denies he had "sexual relations" with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
    January 27 - U.S. First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton appears on The Today Show, calling the attacks against her husband part of a "vast right-wing conspiracy."

    So time is linear, eh? lol
  • crownedgriffin, on 02/17/2008, -4/+81I remember the web in 1998. It was made of animated GIFs and IE5. Fail.
  • Jaziek, on 02/17/2008, -2/+70Using the words "mathematical", "concept" and "representation" doesnt make you sound smart. What you said there was absolute bollocks.
  • yoshman, on 02/17/2008, -1/+62Oh yeah. I miss all the corporate websites that look like myspace pages. :/
  • inactive, on 02/17/2008, -3/+61Right on, dude! 1998 is like 6 months back or something. I broke up with a girl in 2003 (five years ago!) and it's still hard to be around her cos it feels like we broke up last month. Something is very weird about timer since the Internet really took off (1998-199).
  • jbfdiggs, on 02/17/2008, -7/+65A fairytale in the making... I missed the web of 90s.
  • UnWeave, on 02/17/2008, -4/+56I still might
  • Alex2, on 02/17/2008, -2/+51Yahoo once had a simple web page which allowed you to do a quick search.

    Then, they tried to be a 'portal'. company.
    Idiots.
  • Slade605, on 02/17/2008, -2/+50a/s/l?
  • SRSco, on 02/17/2008, -0/+44You would only need to go back 3.5 years. There was no such thing as publicly traded Google stock until 2004.
  • johndoughy, on 02/17/2008, -0/+43Anyone remember at the turn of the millennium, there were so many fighting search engines, that they started making engines that just search all the other engines, like Metacrawler?

    Oh gosh. Back when we played DX Ball and joined lesbian chat rooms. I may not be as old as to remember it's infancy, but I shared adolescence with the Internet.
  • canadianbaking, on 02/17/2008, -0/+40It only gets worse, this mortality thing. Trust me - wait until '20 years ago' hits your ears.
  • theOster, on 02/17/2008, -0/+40wait til friends that are younger than you get married and start making babies. *thats* weird.
  • inactive, on 02/17/2008, -0/+36This kind of realizations hit me every now and then.
  • surfacewound, on 02/17/2008, -0/+35I think you mean a Geocities page.
  • nakp88d, on 02/17/2008, -2/+36I MISS the web of the 90s :-(
  • inactive, on 02/17/2008, -0/+32I'm 17 and freaking out as I type.
  • inactive, on 02/17/2008, -1/+32ah 1998 - Gas was less than a dollar a gallon and we had just sentenced the first world trade center bomber to life in prison. things were looking pretty good. the US was enthralled with the worst possible presidential scandal you could come up with, or so we thought (and congress had the balls to impeach a president back then too). of course we also lost Seinfeld that year but no matter we had the Pentium II 333 to keep us entertained while we listened to that crazy new shock jock Howard Stern. NOW GET OFF MY DAMN LAWN!
  • BlackOp, on 02/17/2008, -1/+32Tell that to Einstein.
  • jonwise80, on 02/17/2008, -1/+32That article really brings me back to the "bad old days" of the Internet. I distinctly remember how horrible other search engines were at returning irrelevant or only tangentially related results. And the ones with their own "popularity" algorithm invariably returned 2 pages of crappy porn sites first, no matter what you were searching for, since it was so easy to fool their system.
    We give Google a lot of crap these days, now that they're a big company, but I think its fair to say that the Internet as a whole likely wouldn't be nearly as useful without their early innovation.
  • zwaldowski, on 02/17/2008, -0/+30They might've noticed the fact that you carry an iPhone... and a time machine.
  • drugged, on 02/17/2008, -0/+30Ah, the good old days, when every search turned up a billion hits on geocities.com!
  • marnaq, on 02/17/2008, -1/+28http://youtube.com/watch?v=wrQUWUfmR_I
  • richbradshaw, on 02/17/2008, -0/+26Who doesn't use go.com?

    Remember lycos, altavista, hotbot et al? Lycos used to be brilliant. Amazing really how google changed all this by moving away from a directory based search engine.
  • UnWeave, on 02/17/2008, -0/+26Which he can do. If time doesn't exist he's not dead.

    ... YO, ELVIS.
  • nedev, on 02/17/2008, -0/+24In 1999 i discovered there are no boundaries to a man's anus.
  • inactive, on 02/17/2008, -3/+27id punch you even if you didnt say it
  • br0wnstar, on 02/17/2008, -0/+23Don't worry, it's natural for your voice to deepen and for you to notice other growth at that age. It's a bit later than it should be, but don't freak out man!
  • johndoughy, on 02/17/2008, -1/+23Sometimes you wish you could give a comment 5 diggs at a time.
  • explnx, on 04/27/2009, -1/+23I think it has something to do with The Matrix being released in 1999. Really. Go watch any movie released before then, it looks kind of old now, but the Matrix could be released right now and not seem at all out of place. Our culture has not advanced any since that year.
  • KLowD9x, on 02/17/2008, -2/+24Yeah really, baby makers piss me off. There are too damn many people already.
  • yoshman, on 02/17/2008, -1/+23Oh you saw my website? :/
  • jarablue, on 02/17/2008, -1/+22I am 32 and have been doing this since I was 17. 1993 BBS and mud's were the hotness and I miss those times very much. I remember that year. Me and my buddy went to EB games. HAH remember Electronics Boutique? They even had EBX. He bought me Baldurs Gate 1 the day it hit the stores as a Cmas present. Even todays search engines fail to Google. Type in something in MSN and I'm like WTF? The hit is just wrong. Google may be evil and blah blah. But what they have just works. Funny how back then google was nobody. Now they are google.
  • doshindude, on 02/17/2008, -1/+21go to yahoo and go into their games area, they still do that.
  • renegadeafk, on 02/17/2008, -0/+19Then there would probably be no google now. Because you fail!
  • madroneDorf, on 02/17/2008, -0/+19i was more of an altavista fan back then, but I really didn't have any "loyalty" to any one search engine, I moved around a lot.

    Now I just use google for 99% of my searches
  • bbardlbradd, on 02/17/2008, -0/+19Dude, before you hit 18, ever year feels like 10. :^/
  • Netrilix, on 02/17/2008, -1/+19Same exact thing for me, except I was a little closer to the correct date. I thought it was 1992. Then I saw 1998 and said "Wait, that wasn't ten ye... oh".
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