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Comment by jonathanstrange | Hacker News Reader

I used AltaVista and Hotbot all the time, as well as other search engines and curated pages, and there was no problem finding things. I believe most people used search engines and aggregation pages since entering the address in the browser bar would simply yield an error if you entered it wrong. Connecting the address bar to a search engine is fairly recent and was disputed a lot.

Google did nothing particularly innovative or new, they just had the cleanest interface, their page was fast, and provided good results. That's what made them successful.

Edit: On a side note, I feel really old now. :(

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I also used Altavista and Hotbot (although I don’t remember why I could choose one over the other for a certain search).

I do remember one point of difference was Google’s “I’m feeling lucky” option that just sent you to the first search result.

I really liked that feature, but I’m guessing was removed in favor of growing impressions and ad revenues.

Google had the best results by far. I remember around 2000 most “regular people” had pretty much given up on the web. It was google and maybe Napster that got people interested again...

I wonder what it’ll be to fix the Internet this time around?

Altvista's edge over the competition at the time was that it indexed the most content. But google came in with pagerank and had superior results. There was a 3 year span or so where people just attributed google's success to minimalism. in terms of minimalism, hotbot was a disaster, but it was the algorithm that truly set google apart.

minimalism has its good points, but falsely attributing it to google's success probably focused too much attention to it in the internet of the 2010s.

Exactly, the single feature that made me use google over yahoo/altavista was the clean interface, I was using dial up back then and it loaded very quickly the others were covered in ads.

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