Ask HN: What was the initial reaction to search engines? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What was the initial reaction to search engines?

3 pointshopa5 comments

My manager the other day mentioned AI reminds him of when search engines like google were first popularized, whereas before you needed a lot of specialized knowledge that was hard to acquire, whereas after knowing obscure details became less important and knowing what to search for became more important. I’m curious for anyone who remembers - what was the reaction / discourse around search engines at the time? Was there a similar reaction to the rise of LLMs?

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No one knew how they could be monetized. The original idea was that they had to be curated: Yahoo led the way into grouping sites into categories. Later came Altavista and others. Again, the infrastructure was expensive and no one knew how all that could be paid for. Google's founders, while still at Stanford, released a picture of a server sitting on a table. That was Google. Later, someone figured out that search equals advertising and that's how search was monetized. At first, local search was useless and newspapers and other legacy media could have hung on to that slice. But Google got better and better...

Somewhat. I remember that I was using Archie for finding files that were distributed via FTP. We had directories like Yahoo or DMOZ. At that time directories were the starting points for me. Internet seemed large, but not infinite.

For searching there was Altavista, Lycos, Hotbot, … Ask Jeeves was something that tried to be more that search engine. You had a feeling that now you can find all of the info and files on Internet. Google wasn’t the first one out there but it seems to me that it is the only one that survived.

I used to work in a CS research lab as an RA while doing my MS. There were mailing lists and chat rooms back then to ask people for help. But if I ran into issues that no one had any clue about, it meant heading to the library and searching for books. I remember spending 3 months at the library on a particular linux kernal module issue, that turned out to be about 5 lines of code. I had to spend a whole lot of time figuring out where to make the change. But that change was effecting all kinds of other modules. Crashes would happen for random reasons. So I tell my prof its probably going to take another 3-6 months before I map out all the issues its creating.

And then Google afrives. So I do a query with the main line of my code change, to see if anyone is talking about it and I find one guy in Israel working on the same thing. Crying about the same issue on his blog and how he had fixed it. Thanks to which my work was over in 3 days. My prof would have funded me for that 6 months if thats how long it took. So it was a big aha moment for everyone.

From what I saw, not at all - it was seen as useful by most people I knew of all different trades ... but later on when searches improved, there were some realisations that some people had shared way too much of their real life details. As such I recall there was an educational effort to prompt people to avoid sharing details that might be used against them. I can't say for sure but I think over the next couple of years a few things were changed within what search engines could search for (eg bank branch numbers became harder to confirm) and eventually especially after iirc M$ complained, removing any real public string search capabilities.

Took search for granted. It was such an early Internet before Google. "Surfing" and "downloading" were concepts to learn. Dial-up required a credit card.

LLMs are this generation's search, but I don't remember search being so reviled. Search opened a door to possibilities. If search were so resisted back then, it would have been a project to recreate the implementation. What did I know back then?

It may have paid off in terms of what is learned making a game versus playing one.

I just accepted search as the thing to do.

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