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Comment by bovermyer | Hacker News Reader

Fun experiment - try finding something on the World Wide Web without using a search engine.

It's not as impossible as you might think. But it's certainly not easy.

Out of curiosity I have no idea how to approach this. Are there indexes of websites available to the public that you are suggesting that can be searched via grep or some simple scripting? Or are you suggesting writing a web crawler to build our own index? Or are you suggesting finding curated links to sites?

I miss the time when Internet was so small that a curated list was possible (Yahoo was priding itself to be biggest curated list[1])

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/19990208021747/http://yahoo.com/

There was a post a month or two ago that talked about the design of the Yahoo homepage back then, and looking at the link again, it's striking how much more pleasurable an experience it is.

I still have a paperback book that claimed to be a comprehensive, not curated list of internet sites. It didn't even come with electronic media as became customary with computer books later on.

There are multiple ways that I know of to approach this problem, but part of the experiment is to explore for yourself.

There was the Open Directory Project. Then AOL bought it and killed it. This is the archived remains:

https://www.dmoz-odp.org/

Just open up the Internet Yellow Pages book. :) https://www.amazon.com/Internet-Yellow-Pages-6th-ed/dp/15620...

My family actually had a book like and I learned about a bunch of the net culture sites through it.

i might be wrong but i didn't think OP was suggesting to re-index the web. that's a totally different beast from finding an answer to a question/problem or learning a new topic.

depending on what i am looking for there are a few avenues i would explore if google wasn't available. github, gitlab, & stackoverflow/stackexchange for code related stuff.

wikipedia for general topics. youtube for how-tos. twitter for the news. newsletters and podcasts for links to new articles.

&c.

yup. use gopher instead

I've idly wondered what would happen if you made a search engine based on a custom crawler that only logged sites without any references to Google.

That could be true to some extent, but the best information I've found on the internet since 1995 have been tematic forums.

Still nowadays the best use of Google for me is to find those tematic forums

And I must say search result quality has declined a lot over the years with the past 3 being worse of the sum of the past 20.

I came on just around altavista/google so I don't remember, did people only use registries before ? or word of mouth ?

must be weird to buy a domain name and still be mostly anonymous and invisible :)

Back in 93/94 you could quickly scan what's new on the internet on mosaic

heh, that's true, the whole web graph could fit on a floppy

Printed magazines recommending the best websites.

Web rings were common. If you visited a webpage on a particular topic, they would usually contain links to other related sites on a side bar. Dmoz was an old registry and I think Yahoo had a registry at one time as well.

Yahoo was a registry back in the day.

Yet Another Hierarchically Organized Oracle

Altavista was early. If you were on in 1996, that was only 5 years after the “birth” of the web. Before spiders, things were organized like Gopher. There were directories you could look up. Some pages kept archives of links.

Web crawlers were introduced in 1993. At that point, gopher probably had more content. Remember WAIS? All the libraries liked that protocol. Encarta was still selling like hot cakes.

Does searching articles on wikipedia count?

I would say that using a website's own internal search is fair game, but good luck trying to find, for example, the link to a blog you forgot the name to. You can try Wikipedia, Youtube, StackOverflow, WaPo's article, but I doubt you'll ever make your way to that blog without the URL to it.

The funny thing is I never book mark. Most of the sites I visit I just remember the URL. On rare occasions when I can’t remember the URL, I’ll search for in on Google. Like most people, I use Google a lot when I’m looking for things I don’t already know, but not when going to my commonly used sites. In the early 2000s I developed a website for a local public radio station. One thing it thought me was the usefulness of “speakable URLs”. Since most pages I built would require someone on the air speaking the url, they had to be short and distinctive, easy to say, and easy to remember (since the listener wouldn’t be taking notes, they had to remember it long enough to get to a computer and type it in). That got me in the habit of just remembering the URL, which I still do to this day.

Looks like the OP domain itself is a version of that.

https://www.superhighway98.com/

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