I still remember when Google launched, the uncluttered homepage was the real differentiator, other search engines, especially AltaVista, were just as good at the time, but they would load their homepage with as much extra stuff as they could think of to attract people. Then Google came along with a quirky name (for the time) and a uniquely minimalist look that broke all the established rules, it wasn’t necessarily better search at that point but it really looked different. Different times of course, a search engine was just another website, no different to your own personal page.

As far as I remember Alta Vista was ok at the beginning, but soon people figured out that you can get to the top result if you just repeat your top keywords multiple times in the meta Keywords tag. A lot of pages would just add “free, mp3, sex” to each page to get more traffic. At this point Google was better, and also would load much faster on dialup than the image heavy sites like yahoo or Alta Vista.

So where do I go for my free mp3 sex now?