Lycos is still around and its search is pretty good | Hacker News Reader

Lycos is still around and its search is pretty good

search.lycos.com

311 pointstikwidd220 comments

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

Ahh, bringing me back! I moved my site between GeoCities, Tripod, and AngelFire all the time back in the day...

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.

Not sure if much has changed.

Those are some high quality motion graphics on the car page, my friend.

Well, same here. An old fan page, last updated 2003. Amazing that it is still up: http://augbunny.tripod.com even the gallery still works http://augbunny.tripod.com/Gallery.htm

I have to give you some credit for the load time!

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.

My site is so bad I'm not going to link to it.

Every site on tripod could probably be stored on a single micro sd card

I used to sell web hosting... the amount of space started at 250k or if you went with the more expensive package was 500k.

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...

4gb of HD space?! That's a lot! :)

Yeah,those machines were expensive at the time...

You can get 1TB MicroSD cards now. So entirely possible.

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!

Also, <marquee> tag and site counter's for life!

Don't forget the venerable <blink> tag and the obligatory "Under Construction" GIF.

And the .shtml guestbook.

I always read that in my mind as “shit mill” am I alone?

I read it as "sheet metal" because there was an HTML editor of the era called "Hot Metal."

It was "dot shitmeal" for me.

or load-bearing CGI and perl...

(perl's OK, CGI had a lot more server side injection risk from what I remember)

CGI as in "Common Gateway Interface" or CGI.pm?

If the former, the injection vulnerability would be in the script talking to the server/database via CGI, rather than in CGI itself.

If the latter I don't remember any major unpatched vulnerabilities in CGI.pm, but it was epically inefficient.

ah, the early days...

https://i.imgur.com/7mr0vjQ.gif

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.

I made a "smoke games" store page. It didn't have a functional shopping cart or anything, just basic HTML with some frames.

> Lots of under construction gifs

Which ones were your favourites?

http://textfiles.com/underconstruction/

Wow. My eyes. The variety is tremendous.

LOL wow, I totally forgot about that! I had more than a few pages with "under construction" including black and yellow striped image.

google has a searchable cache of the internet from like 2004 as they crawled it, and they put it up once or twice for nostalgic giggles.

they really should put it up for science, so you can look up the shit that's been keyword-buried since then.

Same here.

I could say the same about my old Geocities site...

I wish I could find my old geocities site - it had some early (win3.1) apps I wrote.

IIRC they were not good.

Which JS framework did you use for this? I want to use it for my site!

VanillaJS of course! With all the options enabled: http://vanilla-js.com

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.

So that's why the experience on these sites is so shit and I dread clicking any link because it'll make my browser stutter for 5 seconds?

Wow. The page source is gold.

No kidding. Firefox's inspector tool just crashed (went white and unresponsive) while I was making a list of the worst offenses:

- h2, h4, h5 used interchangeably

- embedded wav file loading an image

- loading all JavaScript just below body tag

What's so bad about loading scripts after body?

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.

Back then scripts literally were 1kb at most and not 15mb like today, so it really wasn’t much of a problem.

Back then it took ten minutes to load 1kb

It wasn’t that bad. I remember downloading fairly high res JPEGs (so 30-50kb) on a 36k modem back then, and that might have taken a minute.

Hyperbole is lost on 100% of people on the internet.

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.

This is my zine from 1997. It uses frames. http://scenezine.tripod.com/

Well now I have to watch Gleaming The Cube.

Am excellent movie!

Those with an ad blocker are missing out on the full Tripod experience, make sure to turn it off for maximum fun.

Nice. Was hoping for an IE4 toolbar ad.

Oh my you are so right, i browse with adblock and no js normally, the normal experience is quite rough ^^

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.

<marquee> still seems to work. <blink> doesn't... Any good reason this has been deprecated?

It's a thing of strange beauty, tremendous nostalgia.

I enjoyed the Lagwagon interview.

Looking forward to that mustard plug interview!

"We have frames"

Fantastic.

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".

Oh my gosh, there's even a Guestbook. What a blast from the past.

I always liked tripod way more than geocities.

Is geocities still around?

Looks great on mobile.

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.

There is: https://wiby.me/

Bet you just got a traffic spike

This is glorious. I wish I could even remember my Tripod URL, let alone be lucky enough that it's still hosted.

the internet needs more of this :)

Compare with HN posts of 5 years ago suggesting one moves her blog to LinkedIn streams or Medium

Daaaang, should have gone with tripod instead of geocities. :(

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.

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/

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.

> Google, Bing, and (at lower quality) Yandex are the only

And DuckDuckGo.

DuckDuckGo is just a metacrawler. Depending on the search, it uses either Yandex or Bing.

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.

According to DuckDuckGo,

> 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).

Do you view that as misleading/incorrect?

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)".

That fits well with what GP claimed.

No. Ddg gets most of its index from bing.

Did You check Cliqz already? Independent search index: https://beta.cliqz.com/

There is a lot of technical details about how it’s built on the tech blog: https://0x65.dev/

(Disclaimer: I work at Cliqz)

Maybe unrelated but what are the server costs and hardware used etc for such a thing?

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.

I looked at Cliqz a few months ago, and the crawl didn't seem competitive with Google or Bing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21676600

You mean they are not as competitive as a billion dollar company 20 years in business?

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.

[0] https://beta.cliqz.com/

If you click through my link above (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21676600) my process went like:

1. Search for a blog I follow

2. Look at the snippet for the blog's homepage

3. Figure out how long ago the page must have been crawled to get such an old snippet

I only tried a few, but they were months to years out of date.

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.

Qwant has their own index (or atleast parts) IIRC.

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

Yacy. Legendary yacy. Still around. Also gigablast

Yeah, they say they are powered by Yahoo, which is powered by Bing.

https://info.lycos.com/about/contact-us/

That sounds weird unless either

- it is only part of the story like with ddg

- or Bing has improved a lot lately

- or for some reason I've been extremely biased against Bing

I just tested it and the results were way better than I would expect from Bing.

I just tested a bit more. Here is what I think I saw (safari, iOS):

- bing has improved and is now usable, maybe even pleasant to use compared to Google.

- the results between Bing, DuckDuckGo an Lycos were kind of similar, but not exactly similar

- autocomplete was much better on Bing

- I actually enjoyed the way certain search results were displayed in Bing

Has the exact same poor search results as Bing.

https://search12.lycos.com/web/?q=elm+list

https://www.bing.com/search?q=elm+list

Funny I only ever hear someone call Bing good when it's named something else (DDG, Lycos).

What are you searching for though? Some people care about the Elm language and some people are looking for information about the tree or location.

The "list" in the query string makes the intent clear.

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.

No, "array" would be unambiguous. Asking for a list of different elm species a valid interpretation.

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 may be that this is true of people who use google but less true of people who use Bing.

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.

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.

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.

You're not going to invite Yahoo? :(

Or HotBot? Infoseek?

Yahoo is that cool kid from the 5th grade,who ended up being on drugs and with a dead end job.Nope, not invited.

That is EXACTLY what yahoo turned into!

Dogpile!

Sounds like a dogpile ;-)

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!

"let's just leave this ugly hack here for tonight and get some logs about the restarts, then delete it tomorrow..."

"oh, we forgot the print. lets retry tonight."

"darn, did not happen. lets leave this part in our infra for now until we trigger the edgecase again."

5 weeks (or days...) later: "damn, why did we do that again? better not touch it"

i love it when i find myself cargo culting code like that and finally have the time (and courage) to remove it :)

Apache still doesn't know how to reopen log files when they're rotated :(

That’s news to me. I’ve been managing Apache hosts for well over a decade and never had an issue. Used apache 1.3, 2.2 and 2.4.

What’s your log rotation code look like?

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).

https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/logs.html#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.

How do you rotate without changing the inode?

Sorry, my previous comment was really unhelpful.

What I meant was you should be using pipes and apaches own log rotate code.

Read the “Logging Using Pipes” section at the very end.

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-conf...

(Excuse the DO link, it was just the first result in Duck Duck Go. There’s nothing specific about DO or Ubuntu in this approach)

I’ve used this method on large clusters of very heavily utilised web servers and it works great. No restarts required.

Or Bing? :(

Wasn't there a monkey-themed one, too? I remember it being garish purple and lime green.

Are you thinking perhaps of BonziBuddy?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BonziBuddy

You might've been thinking of HotBot, which was part of the Lycos network along with WebMonkey.

The '90s were definitely a time!

Northern Light.

Inktomi, let's do this!

And let's not forget WAIS!

Watching the final season of Halt and Catch Fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(TV_series... felt like a 1990s search engine reunion :-) Highly recommended for anyone with 90s (or 80s) tech nostalgia

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.

It was a great show! I wasn't in tech in the 80s of seasons 1 and 2, but seasons 3 and 4 felt like I was reliving the past.

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.

Hotbot.

At the time I used mamma.com - such a good and underappreciated search engine. Eventually dwindled and was bought by Copernic.

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).

Amazingly, so is http://www.zombo.com/. It still delivers all it promises

Nowadays you have to go to https://www.html5zombo.com/

According to the cert, it's actually https://html5zombo.com/

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?

> After any Sponsored Links, the Web Results section shows information that comes from LookSmart or AllTheWeb.

From https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2004/03/15/how-lycos-works...

That is from 2004, and alltheweb no longer exists? Looksmart still exists though.

Interesting.

AllTheWeb === Yahoo now.

The few test queries I tried on Lycos seem to be identical (almost down to the ordering) when I tried them on looksmart.com.

Their ads aren't even good lmao. Searching for test brings up the following ad:

Test Test Test Test - Right Now

www.kensaq.com/Test Test Test Test/Here

Welcome to Kensaq.com. Find Test Test Test Test Today!

To be fair, a few weeks ago I searched for "fighter jets" on either Google or Duck and got ads for "Find discount fighter jets in your area!"

Did you buy one? :-)

It just means somebody paid for those keywords.

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)

Just did a cursory search on Lycos, and the top 5 "results" were all ads, the first one being a super-ad with six (!) sub-headings.

It also seems like Lycos does not default to https. Oh, Lycos. At least you're trying!

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 used to work in the same building as Lycos, which is how I learned about their (now defunct) zombie-themed weather app, WeatherZombie [1].

The forecast sometimes called for "Rrrrraiiiiiiinnnnnnsssss"

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20140703054940/http://www.weathe...

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.

Too bad that would never happen.

Wow. I tried a few searches and the results actually contained the words I searched for. It's amazing.

Lycos must have hired an archeologist to recover this long lost technology from an ancient data center.

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".

Did you put the title in quotes?

I didn't do that on any of the services.

Then you didn’t use lycos correctly.

> I just searched the exact title of an article... and the result wasn't on the first page.

This happens to me on Google a lot. I guess mileage varies.

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.

Looks like it's mostly Bing. First five results for 'big chungus':

Google:

- dictionary.com

- knowyourmeme

- artsatmichigan.umich.edu

- urbandictionary

- thetab

Bing:

- knowyourmeme

- silvergames

- wikipedia

- urbandictionary

- joke battles wikia

Lycos:

- knowyourmeme

- urbandictionary

- silvergames

- youtube (BIG CHUNGUS | Official Main Theme | Song by Endigo) [this is the sixth result on Bing]

- joke battles wikia

Yandex:

- big chungus wiki

- youtube: big chungus (song)

- knowyourmeme

- memepedia.ru

- urbandictionary

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.

> Do they get special rates?

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.

[1] https://developer.yahoo.com/search/boss/boss_guide/BOSS_Gett...

They probably didn't crawl it yet, likely having much less resources than google.

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

Oh man, Tripod and Angelfire too? I’m back in the 90’s for a minute.

Haha. Guess who I’ve seen around Toronto on “tech swag” backpacks?

https://www.tucows.com/

They don't offer software downloads any more? I browsed Tucows a lot, looking for cool new software..

Same! It looks like they’ve completely junked their old content and pivoted hard.

No, they haven't.

http://www.tucows.com/downloads/

I’ll be damned. I just didn’t see that anywhere on the main site.

That’s also a blast from the past. Look at the number one freeware download:

https://ibb.co/gDZjjBf

I remember spotting tucows again when 8chan was trying to get back online they used Tucows.

It was like running into that old buddy from school and he lets slip he is into some horrible stuff now...

Nowadays they're actually one of the world's largest registrars via their subsidiaries.

Apparently Software Tool & Die is still active, if you want to flash back even earlier than that (my first email account was on ‘The World’).

The World is still a going concern although they configured something poorly a few years ago severely breaking kibo.com

Wow, just tested it with

- a weird old Norwegian word (some of the results it surfaced amazed me),

- Angular 9 new features (nice collection og blogs, stackoverflow results etc)

- Angular momentum (Nice mix of brands, tutorials etc with the Wikipedia article on top of the results).

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.

There are a lot of assumptions in this post. A more likely explanation is the search term has been SEO’d to hell.

I'm not in the search engine or SEO industries, but:

Isn't it Google's job to deal with that type of thing in order to give us an accurate print-out of what's most relevant to a search query?

Would they do the same thing (i.e. do nothing) if SEO was burying their own Google products' search results?

My cynicism is necessary for a healthy and thriving ecosystem. It should not be discouraged.

Why did it work on Bing then?

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.

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.

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.

When I entered "bicycle touring" it showed about a dozen links. When I clicked on "More" it showed me the same dozen over again.

That happened to me too.

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.

No clue what the issue is.

I was just thinking today that I am surprised that whomever owns Ask.com hasn't brought out an Echo clone called Jeeves.

Good to know! After Google search has become a bad joke and completely unusable, every alternative is welcome.

https://www.excite.com/

Bless them for not changing their logo too much. And for their treatment of mobile browsers

https://ibb.co/vLBPYTW

Excite loads for me, then immediately disappears. There is a JS error in the console: Uncaught (in promise) TypeError: t.apply is not a function

hmm i got a blocked (3rd party) url from nod32.

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...

In the first five seconds on the site i noticed the temperature is not in my local unit. I tried to change it to degrees C, but it won't work.

It seems to be using Google Analytics and Google fonts...

I'm shocked that tripod is apparently still around.

Damn. I did a vanity search and everything above the fold on my laptop screen was an ad.

First thing after that was me, though, so that's alright I guess.

So, it's just like google then. Nice.

"Its search is pretty good"? I entered "cf.lumen" and all the results were completely unrelated ads.

It doesn't seem to be very up to date, and the first query I tried returned a phishing website as a first result.

Experiment: search for “delta“. Delta airlines is the 6th result below (what i think are) 5 ads. Doesn’t seem that good.

Are they hiring?

The pagination on SERP does not work for me - clicking 'next' redirects to the same, 1st page results

When you search for "Google" you get no results. That's kinda funny.

Wow, I didn't know this was still around, this is a serious blast from the past.

"Redwood city" weather, complete with lower-case "city"

Hi from RWC! :)

404 all this traffic from hackernews was too much for the 90s

Looks like it’s the same as yahoo, down to the search suggestions.

It s still a TERRIBLE search engine for who wants to test it....

Oh wow no ads. This by itself is good enough for me to switch.

I wonder how many times they changed hands

searches are identical to the results from duckduckgo, looks like they are using Bing.

nope. search is not good.

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.

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