I Remember When

I will probably be one of those fathers that tell my kids tall tales of when I was a youth and things were so hard and difficult.

Imagine using the Internet when there was no good search engine like Google. I couldn’t sleep tonight and woke up thinking about search engines and how one of my preferred ways to search the internet used to be using Inktomi. Search engine technology has came a long way since the mid 1990’s. I remember using Altavista, which until just now I hadn’t typed into a browser for many years. Thats all there used to be, it ran on a few servers inside Digitals network somewhere and index a somewhat large part of the internet, or what was believed to be a large part of the internet.

A bit later some guys at Berkeley decided to write Inktomi which was a distributed application, unlike Altavista. I remember using the 2 side by side and you could actually sit and wait quite some time for Altavista to return you a query while Inktomi would return a query much quicker. A few years later (probably late 1999) in an office at Avenue A Media a co-worker wanted to show me this new search engine, something called Google.

When I was a kid we used to have to wait for our search results.

I forgot all about WebCrawler

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