No sarcasm, I think it's true. I'm talking about the original search engine, not what they've done to it since. They've done amazing things to it since and it's obviously turned into an arms race, but we all build much more complex software today than we did 20 years ago.
Better tools, better practices, better understanding of what works and what doesn't, better resources online.
Even simple things like most people these days understand how HTTP actually works, back then you'd be lucky to find people who even understood basic HTML.
Did you use Google back then? It wasn't actually that great, you might have to do a bunch of searches, try excluding words, just to get some vaguely good results. It was a lot better than the rest though.
a good and fast search algorithm for a massive database across dozens of machines isnt a trivial thing even today if you build it from scratch. In the 90ies their algorithms were world class!
Google's results were orders of magnitude better, in my opinion. I don't remember how it compares to today, frankly, but I remember the tears of joy I shed at the time.
I think I switched from using a combination of altavista & one of the search sites that combined a lot of different results.
It was better, but I can't remember thinking it wasn't orders of magnitude better. I didn't use it once and think 'oh my god, this is perfect'. It was a gradual switch. And to begin with the thing which made me use it more was the simple UI.
Really, it wasn't that much better, at least not to me at the time. I'd switch search engines every few months, or more accurately have 3 or 4 search engines to deploy against difficult queries.
Google was _slightly_ better than alltheweb.com at the time that I added it into the mix. But it slowly began to win more and more of the "query requires using 4 search engines" contests and eventually I only used one.
Better tools, better practices, better understanding of what works and what doesn't, better resources online.
Even simple things like most people these days understand how HTTP actually works, back then you'd be lucky to find people who even understood basic HTML.
Did you use Google back then? It wasn't actually that great, you might have to do a bunch of searches, try excluding words, just to get some vaguely good results. It was a lot better than the rest though.