# Was the pre-1990 Internet completely unsearchable? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [September 30, 2015, 4:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-pre-1990-internet-completely-unsearchable/733049 "2015-09-30T16:09:36Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 6\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![protoboard](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/fbc32d/32.png) [@protoboard](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/protoboard)\ **Post date:** [October 2, 2015, 10:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-pre-1990-internet-completely-unsearchable/733049/41 "2015-10-02T22:23:23Z")
> [@Derleth](#): > > I think you’re trying to define “search engine” way too narrowly and draw distinctions which don’t exist. Yes, search engines prior to Google tended to be primitive. Yes, they tended to be fooled by keyword spam. Yes, it became hard to find things using them as the Web grew and spammers caught on to how easy it was to spoof those search engines. > > However, a bad, simplistic car is still a car. A Model T is a car even though its controls are rebarbative and it would never be as useful or as reliable as the cheapest Toyota on the lot. Google advanced search engines, it didn’t invent them, and not even Google has ever claimed otherwise. In that case, I would say the Knowbot lookup (or maybe the WHOIS, though that was just on one server) is the first search engine on the Internet, not Archie. Archie would be the first _content_ search engine, as opposed to looking up emails and users. ---
**Author:** ![Terry\_Kennedy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/c57346/32.png) [@Terry\_Kennedy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Terry_Kennedy)\ **Post date:** [October 3, 2015, 6:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-pre-1990-internet-completely-unsearchable/733049/42 "2015-10-03T06:28:29Z")
> [@The\_Angry\_Badger](#): > > Somehow, for some reason, the [Netscape Welcome Site](http://home.mcom.com/home/welcome.html) is still up and running. :eek: It is a [personal project](https://www.jwz.org/blog/2008/03/happy-run-some-old-web-browsers-day/) of a former Netscape developer. Brief quote from that link: > [@jwz.org](#): > > \*When I heard that AOL was shutting down their Netscape division for good, I mailed a contact there and asked if they’d transfer the [mcom.com](http://mcom.com) domain to me, so that I could resurrect these web sites to make the old browsers work right. > > My contact asked around, and much to my surprise, the answer was yes! Wheels were put in motion, AOL’s operations folks removed their dependencies on those domains (no idea what those were!) and the domains were about to be transfered… when… > > AOL Chief IP Counsel and Time Warner blocked it. > > Why? > > Because their lawyers determined that, because [mcom.com](http://mcom.com) is ten years old and four letters long, they could make several hundred thousand dollars by simply putting it on the market and selling it to a spammer! > > And so they began the process of doing exactly that. > > Fortunately, my contact (who prefers to remain anonymous) talked them out of this, pointing out that it would be perhaps not the best PR move. But still, they wouldn’t transfer it to me. AOL still owns the domains. However, they were willing to host the old Netscape content there, at least for now. > > So, thank you to my anonymous contact for all the help! And thank you to AOL for hosting these historic web pages. And for not (yet?) selling the domain to a spammer. \* Netscape used to have a feature where it would look at all your bookmarks and show you which had changed since the last time you looked. That feature became impractical pretty quickly and was removed. Regarding what “the Internet” is - some people (myself included) consider it to be “systems reachable via TCP/IP”\*. Other people consider it to be “anybody I can exchange email with” or some other, similarly large, definition. - Or, in the old days, NCP. My oldest email address dates to 1975. ---
**Author:** ![Derleth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Derleth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Derleth)\ **Post date:** [October 3, 2015, 8:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-pre-1990-internet-completely-unsearchable/733049/43 "2015-10-03T08:17:30Z")
> [@protoboard](#): > > In that case, I would say the Knowbot lookup (or maybe the WHOIS, though that was just on one server) is the first search engine on the Internet, not Archie. Archie would be the first _content_ search engine, as opposed to looking up emails and users. You have a bizarre aversion to accepting the definitions others use, perhaps founded on an even more bizarre aversion to accepting consensus history. WHOIS never indexed documents, so it can’t be a search engine. (WHOIS isn’t and wasn’t one server, either; it was and is a protocol. Multiple servers implement it.) The same objection applies to the Knowbot software, to the extent it ever existed: No indexing of documents, not a search engine. ---
**Author:** ![aldiboronti](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/9fc348/32.png) [@aldiboronti](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aldiboronti)\ **Post date:** [October 3, 2015, 9:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-pre-1990-internet-completely-unsearchable/733049/44 "2015-10-03T09:13:16Z")
> [@Pork\_Rind](#): > > There still is and it appears to still have traffic! > > [Redirecting to Google Groups](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/alt.fan.cecil-adams) That’s weird. Why would people still be posting there rather than using this board? ---
**Author:** ![Some\_Call\_Me.Tim](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/439d5e/32.png) [@Some\_Call\_Me.Tim](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Some_Call_Me.Tim)\ **Post date:** [October 3, 2015, 9:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-pre-1990-internet-completely-unsearchable/733049/45 "2015-10-03T21:04:46Z")
It’s not exactly a search engine, but the game netrek had what was called a metaserver, which basically pinged all the known netrek servers regularly and could therefore be asked for the current list of servers and how many people were playing at each (or the size of the wait queue, if applicable) I thought it was earlier, but it looks like the metaserver dated from 1992. Netrek is very notable in the history of internet gaming as a huge number of the basic ideas for how to make an internet game work were in effect protected from patent trolls because netrek could be pointed to as prior art, and was sufficiently documented in a timestamped way (mostly in usenet postings) to hold up in court. Not only did they come up with a lot of the basics, but they in effect bequeathed them to the public domain. ---
**Author:** ![edwardcoast](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/cab0a1/32.png) [@edwardcoast](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/edwardcoast)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2015, 5:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-pre-1990-internet-completely-unsearchable/733049/46 "2015-10-05T05:23:11Z")
> [@DrCube](#): > > Search as we know it was invented by Google. Prior to Google, website owners had to send their website URL to Yahoo, Alta Vista, etc. individually, along with a list of keywords associated with the site’s content. If you typed in one or more of those keywords, you got a hit, but otherwise, you were SOL. Most of the time, I learned about websites through word of mouth or they were written down in an advertisement or something. Search before Google was a different beast entirely. It didn’t even work as well as “ctrl-F” does in Word. This is how I remembered it too. Yahoo was the king of the search engine for a long time until Google came along and even after that it took years until Google’s search engine became what it is now. I stopped using Yahoo years ago and have noticed they have caught up with Google I believe. Something in the knowledge of search had to improve because before it, it was simply a mess to find things. People don’t seem to talk much about the quantum leap that took place in search engines for organic search. I remember being seated next to someone at a conference in 1997 who was talking about how useless the internet was because you couldn’t find anything when you did a search, which was Yahoo at that the time. This was an accurate portrayal, it returned things totally unrelated to what you were searching for. I remember someone complaining to me how he entered in the name of the then current hurricane and it didn’t have any information and he was surprised by this. The other part of the problem was, content on just about anything didn’t yet exist on the internet like it does now. Creating content early on that was up to date and of high quality was expensive and other than people selling infrastructure solutions for the internet, not many had figured out how to make money with it yet. With no money, there wasn’t the support and early on there weren’t the cookie-cutter websites and blogs that people can easily create. You had to have been technically savvy to seriously participate in the internet. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-pre-1990-internet-completely-unsearchable/733049.md?page=2)