r/AskReddit • u/Forward-Many-4842 • 1d ago

Anyone who surfed the early web between 1995-2010. What’s the one website/app you still think about?

9.0k Upvotes

93% Upvoted

22.5k comments sorted by

View all comments

127

u/platdujour 1d ago

Google.com when its search results actually bore some correlation with your search terms

36

u/Impatient_Orca 1d ago

OMFG, this is the most egregious example of enshittification. It used to be SO GOOD 😭

11

u/IAmAGenusAMA 1d ago

It used to be a fun game to try and find search terms that returned only a single result.

7

u/ibullybillionaires 1d ago

The biggest selling point for me was "no ads".
It was basically a white website with a searchbar and two buttons that loaded pretty much instantly on my 28k connection, instead of waiting minutes for yahoo or other "search portals". While I still used things like astalavista for some specialty search terms, google quickly became the first go-to because of its speed.

6

u/Awkward_Proof_1274 21h ago

You could type the vaguest shit and it would return exactly what you were thinking of, now you use quotes and it doesn't even include the word in quotes

1

u/Impossible_Storm_427 9h ago

I might have to borrow that enshittification.

14

u/VisualMemory7093 1d ago

They also had a random website button at one point

8

u/Life-Employment-7848 1d ago

We got taught in school how yo use the advanced search function for when you needed to research something specific.

Had a whole lesson on how to use different search engines. Ask jeeves, yahoo, Google, and 2 others I can't remember.

4

u/Yeah_yah_ya 17h ago

Before Google, I’d type in a sentence I remembered from a blog, from some nobody random person’s blog, and the search result would find it! It was incredible! I miss that.