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Comment by qingcharles | Hacker News Reader

Whatever you think about the quality of the response, this is an end of an era right here. The 30-year reign of 10-link SERPs is on life support.

I can't remember what I used for search before AltaVista? I know I had a notepad on my desk. A lot of web sites I used didn't even have domains so you had to just note down all the IPs.

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Translations suffered a similar fate already a while ago. Some of the results are completely unusable AI gibberish now, sometimes even with invented words. That's for English -> German.

What's baffling is that translation is the core competency LLMs were designed for.

This happened a few months ago. They changed the backend completely. You can also notice it’s much slower (say from 5 ms to 200 ms). But I don’t think it’s worse.

It is. There are cases where simple words or common expressions in very mainstream languages (French, German, English) just aren't translated at all or translated ridiculously badly.

The translation built into Chrome regularly misinterprets Japanese as Chinese (despite this being objectively, trivially detectable for any significantly long string based just on the codepoints) and offers no way to correct it.

This is a new regression!

Lycos?

I also used Archie for ftp search, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archie_(search_engine) and Veronica for gopher, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veronica_(search_engine) .

There was barely a web before AltaVista. I can remember buying "web directories" - physical books or magazines of nearly every website that existed at the time.

Then there was the Yahoo Web Directory. I actually wish this would come back. A curated directory of major and trustworthy web locations would actually be pretty good, especially for less experienced web users who can otherwise be easily tricked.

Ask Jeeves, maybe? Depending on what order you found them.

Aside from search engines I also remember webrings.

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