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

[Andrew Sullivan]

On Sat, Dec 20, 2025 at 01:05:11PM -0500, Jack Haverty via Internet-history wrote:

>Yahoo IIRC didn't have a search engine function, but it was a useful 
>Organizer that could be searched.

In retrospect that's probably a very nice way to think about it, but at the time I don't think that's the way everyone thought of it.  It was definitely marketed as a search engine.  As I understand things, their theory was that the web was so chaotic that the only way you'd ever find anything for real was through a human-curated index.  Exhibit A in their argument was Alta Vista, which was hugely ambitious but quickly had so much metadata on everything on the web that it was a real labour to find anything with it.  It's easy to forget, at this remove, how truly revolutionary Google was when it came around (and also how clear-eyed was the thinking that adverts had to be distinct and separate on the page when presented to the user--something later generations at Google forgot, thereby badly eroding the value that Google offered a user).

Note that Yahoo wasn't alone in thinking that just search would be enough for the web.  The Dublin Core Metadata Terms arise from basically the same thinking.

Best regards,

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
ajs at crankycanuck.ca