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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

I was a customer of Viaweb back then. It worked fine. They charged a fixed fee each month. Then they sold out to Yahoo and became Yahoo Store. Yahoo demanded a cut of the merchant's revenue. Dropped Yahoo Store.

It was written in LISP, incidentally. Only language back then that could represent an HTML tree easily.

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How did you find Viaweb as a customer? Google wasn't around in 1995, so I imagine it was hard to find anything.

There were search engines and directories. Google didn't invent search.

Of course not. That's silly. But search engines were terrible back then. I remember using the lot of them, and it was hard to find anything. Using Google for the first time was incredible in 1998/1999. It just showed you exactly what you were looking for.

Did not have that experience. Altavista and friends were good enough, and for a long time google’s ability to understand natural language searches was nothing more than a gimmick. Most of my discovery came from blogrolls, link sharing and portals. Until the SEO era began and the volume of noise became unbearable...

They worked fine, until the keyword spam.

In 1995, search engines were both worse and better. They were worse because they tended to rely on word frequency, boolean search, and an inverted index. They were better for the same reason. The search engine returned results based on what was in the box. It didn't second guess the user.

Even when Google arrived, it was not clearly better (at least for me) because it was hard to drill down a search by refining the specific search terms. But it was more adaptable to the first generation SEO methods.

This was my experience too. A lot of the holdouts that stuck with Altavista etc. were those of us who had learned to use them properly.

Google became better for inexperienced users very quickly, but took a long time to become clearly better for those who could compose complex queries to find exactly what we wanted...

It was an interesting example of how power users can often become blind to major shifts because they've learned to work around the problems the newcomer solves.

Boolean operators and the near keyword were great!

Infoseek was rather good. Especially with Boolean operators.

The web was incredibly small in 1995, anything good was discoverable by word of mouth on email, usenet, irc, link directories, etc.

Before Google was created (and for a few years after) you would have used other search engines/portals. In my experience, the most common back then were (in no particular order): Yahoo, Lycos, Infoseek, Excite, Altavista, Webcrawler.

Also, internet service providers usually provided their own portal, to support less-experienced users.

As a company/site, you depended on - adding yourself - to the lists on these portals to be discovered by customers.

As a user, you depended on the listings on these portals/search engines to discover sites/companies you were interested in.

To add to the list you also had some modest Web advertising, trade show promotion and limited journal / newspaper / magazine ads & write-ups for websites circa 1995.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMOZ

> Yahoo demanded a cut of the merchant's revenue.

Doesn't every payment gateway do this?

Perhaps it was more like the 30% Apple takes for IAPs instead of the 3% the gateways take?

Viaweb was not originally a payment gateway, just a catalog and shopping cart system. Merchants had to make their own credit card processing arrangements. I used Bank of America. This was so new to them I had to put down a $20,000 deposit. Getting all the parts of the credit card processing chain working properly was a big headache. But in the end, it all worked quite well.

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