VessOnSecurity
Nafnlaus 🇮🇸 🇺🇦@bontchev Lol, the internet was never like on the left. Early search was *awful*.
Hitsu Yonai@hitsuyonai @bontchev AltaVista was garbage, which is why everyone jumped ship to Google. Pre-pagerank search was just awful.
And no, the internet was never devoid of SEO. In fact, SEO used to be FAR easier before Pagerank. Even in the early days of pagerank, people immediately started gaming the system by loading each other's pages up with mutual links to climb the graph.
People need to stop looking at the past through rose-coloured glasses. The early internet was terrible.
@hitsuyonai @bontchev Some history on SEO.
The internet was awash in it. Pagerank did an awful lot to push it down, though it's required continual refinements.
The very reason we have Google today as a giant megacorp was because they introduced the first relatively effective anti-SEO technique, onto a web flooded in SEO.
@nafnlaus @bontchev
I'm talking about the web, not the internet (the first browser I used was in corridor between restaurant 1 and the X bus stop at CERN, with a note saying something like 'have a play on this').
Early days one could follow links; then people started to create indexes/ directories and the like.
AltaVista added a search capability - and it had a 'near' keyword - which made finding what one wanted way easier, and also eliminated the little dross that existed at the time.
I'm talking about the web, not the internet (the first browser I used was in corridor between restaurant 1 and the X bus stop at CERN, with a note saying something like 'have a play on this').
Early days one could follow links; then people started to create indexes/ directories and the like.
AltaVista added a search capability - and it had a 'near' keyword - which made finding what one wanted way easier, and also eliminated the little dross that existed at the time.
@hitsuyonai @bontchev Those links were usually dead. Search was so terrible that people created "webrings", which were themselves awful. There was not "little dross" - the internet was primarily dross. Useless corporate "We're On The Internet" PR sites, tons of hideous hand-edited HTML sites written by amateurs, and an endless sea of porn sites trying to bait in everyone from everywhere with SEO, deceptive links, banner ads, etc.
This is what the internet was like:
@nafnlaus @bontchev
have a look at this list, and tell me which ones you don't like:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_founded_before_1995
AltaVista started in 1995. They might have played an inadvertent role in aiding the enshitification of the web, but pagerank was more eaily gamed than AltaVista's 'near' keyword.
The beancounters of UK academia went for remarkably similar idiocy to pagerank.
Google won because the management of DEC, the second biggest computer hardware manufacture on earth at the time, were muppets.
@hitsuyonai @bontchev This has to be a joke. A list of websites from before 1995 as some sort of proof? There were an estimated 23,5k websites in 1995. How many of them are on your list? Almost none. Because they were rubbish.
And the ones that were there? Let's just pick a random one. Apple is seen as a paragon of style and user-friendly convenience, so let's bias the comparison and look up what their website was like.
Lol.
@hitsuyonai @bontchev I'm sure you went there for "Apple Site Of The Day" or "Success Story #182", right?
Vs. today (I just moused over iPhone, pretending that's what I was interested in)
@nafnlaus @bontchev
you just at random picked, from a a list of 1995 websites, that of a company that is currently the second largest on the the planet 👍 .
And you hovered over iphone, because? - you have an urgent need to go shopping?
😉
If you are trying to argue that between 1995 and 1997 I wouldn't have been able to find a iphone through AltaVista, I have to concede you are probably correct.
you just at random picked, from a a list of 1995 websites, that of a company that is currently the second largest on the the planet 👍 .
And you hovered over iphone, because? - you have an urgent need to go shopping?
😉
If you are trying to argue that between 1995 and 1997 I wouldn't have been able to find a iphone through AltaVista, I have to concede you are probably correct.
@hitsuyonai @bontchev That was me trying to skew the comparison *in your favour*.
Bill Woodcock@hitsuyonai @nafnlaus @bontchev
Eh, just goes to show, Wikipedia ain't so dang smart! It's missing Netsurfer Digest! Where we reviewed all the new web sites!
https://web.archive.org/web/19961111181100/http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/v00/nsd.94.06.03.html
Eh, just goes to show, Wikipedia ain't so dang smart! It's missing Netsurfer Digest! Where we reviewed all the new web sites!
https://web.archive.org/web/19961111181100/http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/v00/nsd.94.06.03.html