Had to check. Lycos/tripod is still hosting a stupid website me and some friends made a bit after 2000 (2004?). The cost is probably none (some static files), but I'm impressed they haven't just removed it or lost it during all these years. Stagnant and probably no visitors other than us the weekend we made it.
Edit: the glory: http://moj24.tripod.com/ animated background, marquee and right-click blocking script in case someone tried stealing our content
Don’t forget that <blink> (And maybe <marquee>?) is no longer supported by modern browsers, so you’re definitely missing some major elements of the experience.
Nice. Got a little hit counter at the bottom too. Ah the good old days of the web. I remember when it was all about "hits", "impressions", and "banner ads".
Man, I would be so pumped if I could find my old tripod site. I've looked before but I forgot the username and could never find it. One night as a young teen I decided to read a book "html for dummies", not knowing that 20+ years later the decision would pay off big!
in seventh grade we had a "web" class that, as an assignment, wanted us to find "pen pals" on the internet (lmao great idea), and to make a personal site about whatever. I made an Escape Velocity site. Lots of under construction gifs even when I submitted it.
They're referring to loading the scripts right after the opening body tag (rather than at the end of the body), which historically would block content loading until the scripts all load.
When I saw "embedded wav file loading an image", I was mystified and curious what that even meant, so I looked, and I didn't see. The only wav file I noticed in the source was on the Biler page, and I didn't see anything that suggested it was loading an image, but I didn't look very closely and I guess I'm not sure what to look for. I didn't read the JavaScript at all really, but I searched for "bgsound" with no results but the bgsound element itself, and it has no id and I don't know how else it could be referenced.
My first website from around 1997 is still on tripod. I check it every so often and I'm impressed it's still there. Tripod is like an internet time capsule.
I used to run an ISP. Our server park was two machines each with 128MB RAM and 120MHz classic Pentiums and 4GB of harddrive space. One of them hosted e-mail and shell access for all our users. The other had web hosting for our business users, our tape drive (we backed up the other machine over the network), and our USENET server...
Aww man, I had a Simpsons fan site up in the 1997/1998 time frame that Tripod eventually took offline due to some sort of abuse or something... which I never figured out. There were a lot of Simpsons fan sites up back then, as I recall.
At that time, FOX was egregious about copyright claim to anything. They worked to take anything offline that was not official, hence licensed. I remember going to fan sites back then. One day they'd be up; the next, they'd 404.
Recently, I have been able to find an republish (on my personal site) some of the pages of the mini site I created in 1997: https://bussolon.it/archivio/1997/
This stuff always makes me nostalgic. I wonder how feasible it would be to build a search engine specifically for 90s era websites. Ignore all modern stuff.
Not all of us are so lucky, one of my first websites was hosted by the little known bamboohost.com. Pretty sure it was http://linkinpark.bamboohost.com, but not even web archive can help me recover it.
Some of us are lucky - my first websites are not available anywhere, including the web archive. All that is left are some lingering sigs in a few usenet posts from 1998ish still archived on google.
That site is cute, but I don't think anyone would seriously claim YouTube is built with "Vanilla JS" in the sense of not requiring a heavy framework to make changes even if the millions of lines od non-vanilla code (guess) they build off of isn't public. And Reddit certainly isn't anymore.
Appears to be powered by Bing. The search results are nearly identical. More importantly snippets for each site are identical, which is the real giveaway.
Yep. A lot of folks appear to be pretty confused about retail search engines verses the actual index -- Google, Bing, and (at lower quality) Yandex are the only viable English-language search indices right now. Almost every search box you find on the Internets is powered by one of the three.
I've been using your service as my main search engine on desktop and phone for more than one month (I made an xml file to load it as search engine.) It's okish but not very good at dealing with misspelling, with news and with images. Sometimes I touch the Google button at the end of the page to find what I'm looking for. I hope you keep track of the keywords that go to Google and use them to improve your index. Anyway, it's a good service, thank you.
Hey, thanks for using Cliqz. We're working hard on improvements for each one of the things you mentioned (in that order as well) - so things will definitely get much smoother over the next couple of months.
My grandparent was saying "Google, Bing, and (at lower quality) Yandex are the only viable English-language search indices right now", and my parent was asking whether Cliqz counted. I think the GP is correct and Cliqz doesn't.
Hey, I am working on Cliqz Search [0] and would be very thankful if you point me to quality issues. I use it daily myself (in English) and will make sure those issues are addressed.
This is absolutely fantastic! A REAL alternative not just a search collector like ddg which are endorsed by Google or Bing as the traffic and ad opportunities remain unafected.
SwissCows has its own indexer and I believe they don't rely on any external search source like Bing. They should push for better marketing, less nationalism & better UI like duckduckgo and they would go pretty far imo, their results are often better than DDG
edit : my bad, actually they do use Bing in addition to their own crawler
> To do that, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from multiple partners, though most commonly from Bing (and none from Google).
Yes, as we know nothing about the percentage of traffic which is coming from google, bing or any of the remaining 398 ressources. I can only assume the contribution is abysmal, given the almight of the one trully.
I read that as "Over four hundred sources for instant answers (the big box at the top) etc. What you usually think of as search results ("traditional links") comes from multiple partners, mostly from Bing (and never from Google, which only leaves Yandex and niche providers)".
Doesn't it maintain it's own index on certain terms based on user actions/feedback that changes the bing results resulted? I thought there was an improvement feedback loop.
That doesn't seem to be the case; the only reason they use r.duckduckgo.com is for redirecting without the REFERER according to their docs, so there doesn't seem to be a way for them to do that.
Exactly, it's just Bing without the image or video snippets in the middle. Other than that... it knows I am in Paris, however shows the current temperature in Fahrenheit. So no, bye-bye Lycos.
No, not really. Could be a list of elm tree species, or something even more specific (most famous elm trees, species vulnerable to some disease, etc) that's immediately obvious if you're plugged in to the arborist community instead of the hacker community.
A valid but very unlikely interpretation, which is the point. Every query is ambiguous, but if certain interpretations are much more likely than others, the search engine should respond accordingly.
Someone interested in a list of elm species is much more likely to search for "elm species."
It is very unlikely to be the case. Much more likely is that Bing either doesn't have enough search data to properly answer that query or does not have a ranking model that can answer that query correctly.
We should have a 20 year ( has it been that long? ) reunion. Get all the cast together. Lycos, Excite, AltaVista, AskJeeves, etc. Google will probably be too cool to attend.
Halt and Catch Fire is criminally underappreciated. It did amazingly well at capturing the quirkier side of the home computer revolution first and foremost, but also the early years of the growth of the net, by not talking about the big, famous survivors.
I learned about competing nets for the first time through that show. And then I learned what a vision the world wide web was.
Amazingly one of the characters said he knows how horrible content becomes when it is open to just anyone. Well we got angelfire and tripod today to do just that.
I worked at Go2Net when they acquired Dogpile. I was directly involved in migrating it’s systems to our data centers after the acquisition closed.
I don’t really remember the tech stack, but it was something like 10-15 web servers, probably pentium II or III.
One detail I do remember is the original setup had an Apache log rotation script that would try several times to restart Apache and if it didn’t succeed, it would reboot the server. This ran nightly...
Not sure what bug or issue they were working around. But I thought it was quite an aggressive solution!
You have to do a graceful restart after rotation, according to the docs, which then leads to scripts that try a couple times and then reboot. (It's been a while, but I did have an install where graceful restart would work once, but consistently fail on the second rotation).
If you don’t change the inode then no restart should be required. There’s definitely a few tools out there that solve this problem without needing to restart httpd.
I searched for my own name, and in addition to the usual top hits (like LinkedIn), it provided a link to a popular article I have published few days back as the sixth result.
In contrast, Google primarily links to "scammy" sites claiming to have my phone number and email address, after the usual hits. If I search with the title of the article above, the only link which appears is that from the R Bloggers aggregator (in fact, it appears to me for some Google does not index the articles in my site at all).
A few years ago, looking out of my Boston suburban office window across a rainy, street-lit 128, I caught a glimpse of a strangely familiar dark shape, out of context. Something from my past. Something I hadn’t seen in a long time, and never expected to see again... It looked for all the world like.. a large, black dog.
The mental connections of the symbolism rattled through my mind - folkloric tales of deathly omens, Conan-Doyle’s hound, Harry Potter’s uncle, Churchill’s dark companion...
Through the rain, my eyes focused and it became clear: LYCOS.
Apparently they’d leased some space in the MGH building, and enough funding to spring for a rooftop sign. They’re not there any more - moved into a small Waltham Main Street office in 2015 I believe.
But, as with this article, they keep showing up.. that black dog... reminding us of... something.
Why have they turned up, here, now? What could it mean?
When you buy your ad space at Microsoft, you can determine how it shows up at duck-duck-go, which keywords triggers your ad, what region you want it to work etcetera...
(and yes, that is not a typo, you go to microsoft to buy ad space for ddg)
I tried the search which I used a few weeks ago when someone here claimed that DDG was pretty good. Google found what I wanted above the fold. DDG found it at hit #87 or so (click “next” 7 times). Lycos didn’t find it in the first 100 at least.
I used to like Lycos but there’s a reason everyone migrated to Google.
I wonder how different the internet would be if we had to pay a dollar a month to use certain search engines. Better privacy? Better search results with no ads?
Honesty no idea, but I’d imagine if a million people paid me a dollar a month for a search engine, I could hire seven or eight people and build something more private and better performing... eventually.
I just searched the exact title of an article... and the result wasn't on the first page.
So... I tried it a few more times and I didn't get a single hit for any thing I tried. Google picked up each one with "I'm feeling lucky". DDG got them all too.
I wouldn't describe this as "pretty good", or even "good" or even "worth the time I spent this last 90 seconds".
Just for grins, try the same search on Bing and on Yandex. Look at the first 20 'organic' results (not always easy I know but its worth trying to figure out).
Search indexes have a reasonably unique fingerprint in the rank order of organic results for a given query. The ads and sponsored content are all over the map and perturbed by a/b tests and other things but the organic results typically come straight from the ranking algorithm.
Most "Search portals" (which is the web page that you type at to get your search engine result page from (SERP)) are either using one of the two English language indexes (Bing and Google) with their own ad network, or "blended" index where the search portal might index somethings like Wikipedia and Stack Overflow and then use Bing or Google for the long tail stuff.
The reason for this is economics, you can stand up a search portal on an AWS instance, feed all the queries to Bing out the back and sell ads on it and make a few bucks.
In contrast building your own index requires many more servers, crawling over the content you want to index (if you want to keep it fresh) and generally much larger network and storage costs. So its harder to pay for that with third party ad networks (not impossible, just harder). Pretty much everyone skips this approach for that reason.
Does anyone know how ddg and co. pay for that? Do they get special rates? Because the normal price for using the Search API of Google or bing seems too expensive to be viable.
I'd suspect so, the sticker price is for the little guy who cannot guarantee them a large volume of organic search queries. With a large volume of course you negotiate.
The most interesting thing here is Startpage. Apparently Google doesn't give access to general Search API (as opposed to custom search limited to some sites) for over a decade now. I idly wonder if folks at Startpage have to maintain an extremely plain and not terribly well marketed site lest they be evicted from their deal, presumably a very very old one. According to Wikipedia they probably use Google since the early 2000s at least.
By credit card? :-) Sillyness aside, it is a regular contract. About 6 years ago you could get Bing results through the Yahoo BOSS API[1]. I'm not sure what they charge these days but they used to charge about 80 cents per thousand queries.
You take the query terms and send it to an ad network (or ideally your own ad infrastructure) and the network sends back 1 - 10 advertisements based on the query terms. You put those and the "organic" results you got back from the API out as your search page.
You hope that in the thousand queries you process, some of the people click on the ad links instead of the organic links. If enough do, you "make" the difference between the money you get paid by the ad network and the money you paid to the search index.
If you can send a lot of queries, then you are more valuable to the search company than they are to you, and they will start to pay you to send them these queries. (this is what Google calls "traffic acquisition costs" in their earnings reports). But we are talking a lot of queries, you'd need a really popular Linux distribution or Web Browser to pull that off. Just a search landing page won't cut it.
The contract will also detail things that you can't advertise when you get results from the search index. For example in California Google can't allow anyone to show a payday loan ad next to Google results.
And there are subtleties within that as well, you typically get a fraction of the revenue on an ad that gets clicked on as the "first" click after showing the search engines results, but you can get more (or all) of the revenue on pages that you show after that. That trick is used by people who crawl all of Wikipedia and then show a version of Wikipedia with ads where they buy an ad on Google's results for Wikipedia type queries, and then send you to their own page / copy of Wikipedia with their much more profitable ads.
The more complex it gets the more sketchy the players involved.
Is anybody able to go past the first 2 pages of search results. Lycos does not show page numbers and it looks like it is repeating old results past page 2
Like wolco, I'd kinda like a source for that claim, also. Tucows owns Hover, as well as being the back end for domain resellers through OpenSRS. To the best of my knowledge, Hover has never come up as "the preferred registrar of white supremacists"; while it's not at all unlikely that a reseller who uses OpenSRS's infrastructure has provided registration services to unpleasant characters, that would be a rather weaker claim against them.
I have been shocked recently at how Google.com is no longer the best search engine at many (legal) things I want to find.
Yesterday I was looking for downloadable Word / Excel templates for a certain kind, and wondering why Google wasn't showing me what I KNOW exists on the web.
In exasperation I went to Bing.com. In first few results, it showed me exactly what I was looking for.
Google say they give us what we want, but my story demonstrates that Google now show what they want us to find.
Couldn't help but notice they were significantly de-ranking search results about a competitor's file formats vs. their own. They know I'm looking for DOCX / XLSX files.
Ultimately this is good. By using multiple search engines now, I feel like I'm using The Internet again.
Google is a censored and corporatised filtering of the web - not the web.
This is insane...but it's 2020, and I'm going to check out Lycos.
I’ve noticed this as well. Searching for Iowa caucus for instance gave me a ton of news sites, twitter hits, ads and then far down the page the Iowa Democrats site, still not even the caucus results page. Good for as revenue, bad for searching for data.
Because companies aren't spending millions of dollars, hiring specialists and tweaking their content in every which way to get to the front page of Bing.com results.
We used to deliver search to Lycos in the late 1990s / early 2000s. I despised them deeply and the experience taught me that you shouldn't go out of your way to please the wrong customer. Lycos had no taste.
surprised that searching 'sex chat' all of the top 10 it shows are many of the sites today's current top 3 engines show in the top 20 or 30.. so it's more modern than I expected.
However when I click next it just reloads the same results page. Thought it might be a firefox ublock origin thing, but I get the same issue with chrome.
In the end it's funny: it shows my location (a borough in London),but when I click on jobs,it shows positions in Nashville... According to Wikipedia, just 3 years ago there were still 500 people working there...
Not really. My test is my handle “geuis”. It’s always autocorrected to “genius”. Google and Bing at least have the “did you mean geuis” link. Lycos doesn’t.
Edit: the glory: http://moj24.tripod.com/ animated background, marquee and right-click blocking script in case someone tried stealing our content