[ih] The web as wind and whirlwind? (was Re: History from 1960s to 2025)

[Greg Skinner]

On Dec 20, 2025, at 1:05 PM, Jack Haverty via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
> Before search engines, in the very early days of the WWW, a few "bookmark sites" were on the Web.   They simply listed a bunch of sites with hotlinks to each, enumerating whatever the site's author considered interesting to some audience.
> 
> I created one of these myself, for use within Oracle's internal network, for two purposes -- to provide a list of resources that company staff might find interesting or useful, and to educate them about the technology, which seemed to me to be the "killer app" that people had been seeking since the early days of the ARPANET.  Telnet, FTP, and email were useful, but there had to be something else.   Lots of candidates appeared over the years (archie, wais, gopher, ...) but none of them reached critical mass
> 
> But the "first search engine that mattered" to me was Yahoo.  Someone in Silicon Valley had told me that YAHOO was an acronym for Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Organizer, which seemed pretty accurate.  It "organized" the neonatal Web.   I remember bringing up the main yahoo page and then using the browser's "find" command to search for the specific site I was trying to find.
> 
> Yahoo IIRC didn't have a search engine function, but it was a useful Organizer that could be searched.
> 
> /Jack

Actually,Yahoo had a search engine function.  Over time, they incorporated results from other search engines.  See the Yahoo Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo) for more of the history.

--gregbo