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Google in 1998 (google.com)
110 points by dana0550 on Sept 26, 2013 | hide | past | favorite | 67 comments



Apart from the cheesy look of the logo, that actually looks much better, nicer and cleaner than the monstrosity they are serving today.

It gives the user a very good, immediate overview of the results without bad, distracting UI noise all over the place. Sometimes less is definitely more.

Not that it bothers me much though, I've long switch to duckduckgo. They are actually innovating at this search-engine game, much unlike Google.


You cant be serious. I mean, it's nice that duckduckgo tries, but compared to google their "innovation" is basically non-existent. The amount of special cases and functionality google has added to their search engine the past couple years is massive[1]. They have become just fantastic at giving the user what they were searching for right away without even having to click on a link [2]. The use of space by google is so far ahead of DDG it's not even fair.

That which i have mentioned doesn't even touch the search algorithm itself, which I probably don't even have to say anything about because it's common knowledge how far ahead google is in that aspect too, not to mention all the search related settings you can configure if you have a google account, which also are quite massive.

Competition is good, but at this point there is no competition yet.

[1] - http://www.google.com/help/features.html [2] - http://i.imgur.com/rN0Vge0.png


You cant be serious.

Oh but I am. It's nice that you are attempting back your point with concrete examples, but none of those examples impress me. Those features are implemented in a way which I dislike.

And that's the thing here: Google has stopped innovating, at least as far as features I appreciate is concerned. Yes, that is subjective, but so are most of your points as well.

Personally I much prefer DDG's response[1] to your one search query. I think the focus-nessed of that response is much more impressive and innovative than Google's attempt.

Does Google even have a "Official site" feature yet? That's one of the few things which I use every day with DDG. It's one thing less I have to worry about when looking for things which are new to me.

[1] http://i.imgur.com/khbMz7p.png


Google has stopped innovating, at least as far as features I appreciate is concerned.

I agree. But, as always, we're not the customer, we're the product. Google continues to innovate on things that make money. Why would you expect a profit-seeking company to do otherwise?


How do you know what the official site for a text string is?


> That which i have mentioned doesn't even touch the search algorithm itself, which I probably don't even have to say anything about because it's common knowledge how far ahead google is in that aspect too,

It is a source of great sadness to me that Google's algorithm, and the misuse of it be SEO scumbags, has fucked the web as a fun place to get information.

Even if we remove the scumbags we see a degraded web experience. Here's one example.

Play Dough recipe:

---- You need:

2 cups plain flour (all purpose) 2 tablespoons vegetable oil 1/2 cup salt 2 tablespoons cream of tartar 1.5 cups boiling water (adding more in increments if needed) food colouring (optional) few drops glycerine (optional- adds more shine!)

Method:

Mix the flour, salt, cream of tartar and oil in a large mixing bowl Add the boiling water Stir continuously until it becomes a sticky, combined dough Add the food colouring and glycerine (both optional) Allow it to cool down then take it out of the bowl and knead it vigorously for a couple of minutes until all of the stickiness has gone. * This is the most important part of the process, so keep at it until it’s the perfect consistency!* (If it remains a little sticky then add a touch more flour until just right) ----

With images this is, at most, a couple of hundred kB. But the page I get this from is over 2 MB.

(http://theimaginationtree.com/2012/04/best-ever-no-cook-play...)

It's a suboptimal experience. It's not even the ads that I dislike, I'm pretty tolerant of them. it's all the other junk and cruft. A 1998 WWW site would have had a recipe, and then had reasons for including the different ingredients, and an explanation of what happens if you don't have them. (and maybe it would have been collaboratively written by a Usenet newsgroup for their faq.)


Ajax search was the most disruptive part of the UI for me. I still don't understand the point of it. Well, I understand the auto-suggest, but why send me right away to the results page, and auto populate the results before I've asked you to? I'm not done typing yet. It's completely unintuitive behavior. It is jarring.


You can get a quite simpler look if you disable javascript. Same goes for gmail, I've been using gmail's html-only interface (well, there actually is some js but its not required) and I get a kick out of how many complaints I hear about the new interface. The html-lite version still looks and acts a bit like gmail did in 2005.

Of course now that I've said that, it'll probably be gone soon...


distracting UI noise all over the place. Sometimes less is definitely more.

Depends on the goal. Right now Google wants users to click on ads so if they make everything confusing, ads seems refreshingly simple. Also a link to a non-Google site means less chances on clicking on Google ads so they stuff search with Youtube crap, Local, Images...and they stretch the ads vertically to take virtually all the screen on top resolutions etc. A lot of times Google results for expensive keywords are totally out of whack, but ads are perfect.

Google is ripe for disruption and couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of folks. If they lose the Mozilla and iOS traffic it's a nice start. If we had a government, they wouldn't allow Google with all that market share to buy more.


They were so confident about their search results that they were giving links to their competitors' websites at the bottom of their page


That was standard trade craft back then. Everybody did it.


Back then people didn't care their site will leak PR ;)


Why? What was the reasoning?


Three reasons.

First, professional courtesy. Search was a very small world in 1998 (that is, in terms of people working in the field). There was an academic quality to the industry, with a lot of freshly minted college kids, teachers and universities involved.

Second, a stamp of confidence in their technology. That is: if we're not doing a good enough job, we deserve to lose, and here's our competition.

Third, money. Companies often paid to be listed at the bottom of search engines. In 1998 Google was still highly reliant on partners that used their search technology (they were battling eg Inktomi in this respect).


Are you by any chance a former Inktomi developer?


It's a bit of a shame that the link to AltaVista doesn't point to the search engine site. I think they did eventually get altavista.com (it redirects to Yahoo now) but the IA link given pre-dates that.


For me, following the link here comes up as my default set-up for iGoogle, the home page skin that Google will deprecate in another month or so.

I have used Google since the beginning. I was amused, when I updated my personal website at the beginning of this year, to discover that most of the pages on my site still had a paragraph specifically recommending Google, as if most people had never heard of it. That's how enthusiastic I was about Google when I first discovered it. (I discovered Google when it was still Backrub, but examining which search engine spiders visited my site.)


Try:

https://www.google.com/ncr#q=google+in+1998&safe=off

The ncr part is "no client redirect", this should keep you on google.com instead of redirecting you to a localized version.


Thanks for that tip. Alas, I still see iGoogle that way. I can try on another browser. Yep, it works in IE on my desktop machine--Chrome must have deep settings that force the customization to iGoogle.


Give me an ajax-less google search over what we have now any day.



I use this one

https://www.google.co.uk/webhp?complete=0&hl=en&pws=0&safe=o...

to disable autocomplete, personalised search results and safe filter.


Pretty cool! Now if I can figure out how to default to this...



Seeing as how this is HN, I knew someone was going to write this...


I know this is a sarcastic take on HN's overall conservation, but you must admit Ajax has its place, and it's not necessarily on a search engine result page.

Besides, it ruins much of my browser behavior, shortcuts for example don't work at all, such as backspace. A barebones page would have been a better fit in the target environment (the web).


Google seems to be the biggest culprit in breaking keyboard shortcuts: backspace, keyboards, etc. Surprises me, because surely many of their employees are 'power users' - doesn't it infuriate them, too? I wonder if Chrome has a 'don't hijack keyboard' extension ...


Before Google I used Dogpile, brother recommended it, before that I had to craft some clever searches in Alta Vista. Google rocks.


Authentic markup full of <font> and <b> tags, too!


Larry coded that up probably. Don't make him feel bad! ;)


Current search pages still use <b> tags (e.g. when part of the green <cite> portion is bolded)


So what? CSS was just a joke in 1998


What I miss most is the "cached" link being directly visible. Mostly because 90% of my Internet browsing has to be done this way due to draconian proxy rules at work. Anything forum-like is blocked (yes, even StackOverflow).

I cried a bit when they made the cached link a 2 click process.


Do you know about custom styling/scripting? With a littie CSS you can have it visiable by default. Look into Stylish: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylish/fjnbnpbmke...


Try your query on: AltaVista Excite HotBot Infoseek Lycos Deja Yahoo! Amazon Open Directory eGroups


Trying each of those today (the links on the site go to waybackmachine) -

Altavista.com: Redirects to yahoo.

Excite: still up

HotBot (boy there's one I haven't heard of in years): still up

InfoSeek: redirects to go.com, which appears to now host the site of Disney's holding company.

Deja.com (which I think I remember): redirects to google groups

Yahoo: still up

Amazon: still up

dmoz.org: still up

egroups: redirects to yahoo groups


1998: "Showing results 1-10 of approximately 234,000 for google; Search took 0.06 seconds"

2013: "About 709,000,000 results (0.38 seconds) "

My how we've grown!


6 times slower? This is bullshit.


But 3000 times more hits, so it's actually 500 times faster. :)


I assume that the top "Google RN" link refers to "RealNames", which was a cross between AOL keywords and an alternate domain name system. It surprising to see that there, because canonical registries (i.e. Yahoo, RealNames) are kinda the antithesis of what Google was pioneering at the time (i.e. PageRank).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealNames

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2067393/RealNames-To-Cl...


I wonder if they kept the data so we can search as if it was 1998.


i would pay to be able to do that for 5 minutes


This is an easter egg for their 15th birthday tomorrow.


Biggest thing I noticed is that there aren't any ads.


http://web.archive.org/web/19980505193923/http://www.altavis... is wrong.

Try this instead: http://web.archive.org/web/19980505193939/http://www.altavis...

GoogleScout wasn't around until 1999: http://googlepress.blogspot.com.au/1999/09/googles-new-googl...

Also, I think 'Cached' used to be called 'View old version', having done some research.


The altavista.com link is wrong if you are/were trying to get to AltaVista search engine. That said, I'm curious which domain Google actually linked to at the time as the search is still available on that page.


looks like google.stanford.edu is still live, but not what it used to be either :/

http://web.archive.org/web/19981111183552/http://google.stan...



Java Applets were light years ahead of anything else including Flash. The single only reason why Java Applets did not become the defacto interactive web client side technology is due to (in my opinion) Microsoft. And as another reader pointed out, it's an animated GIF.


From my perspective, the reason they didn't catch on was because they took forever to load and most did gimmicky things like the cheezy water effect. If they had used it to make a YouTube-alike back in the day, it might have caught on.


I see your point but Youtube (good example BTW) wasn't even founded until February 14, 2005, this was long after the Java battles of the late 1990's.




Google would never get away with a logo like this today: http://i.imgur.com/xba1orN.png


Doesn't work on mobile.

....oh.


It's totally responsive. Good grid system too.


Interesting that there's an exclamation mark after Google. Were they copying Yahoo! or was that a thing in 1998?


Amazing how all of the subtle changes make it look like a kid's toy.


Not really. The current flat design fad will look tired in a few years too. (I'm going to do a dance in the street when the designers finally get tired of Helvetica Light.)

What's really interesting is that the link to Amazon in 1998 looks basically like Amazon today. There's one site that hasn't really changed at all in 15 years; instead of switching fonts around, they built fulfillment warehouses instead. Interesting when you look back into the past.


I completely agree. I think it's amazing how our perception slowly shifts over time, until things that seemed high tech turn antiquated simply because we were overexposed to a certain font.


What about Webcrawler and Alta Vista, Lycos and HotBot etc. Did you even use Webcrawler? I'm sure that everyone remembers at least Alta Vista.


I remember eule.de [1] which was one of the best German search engines back in 1997 :)

[1]: http://web.archive.org/web/19970418094812/http://www.eule.de...


I hated that new thing Google and stayed with Alta Vista until the end :)


Webcrawler was my favorite back then.


The best part is the : Try your query on : AltaVista, Yahaoo!...


Much better!!


This was not long after I gave up on webcrawler and altavista. I miss the picture of the spider or web, or whatever.

You know, despite it being around almost forever (I think they tried removing it once, right?), I've never really used "I'm feeling lucky". I just never feel that way when I'm using Google, I guess.




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