Talking to a brick wall...

Rants & Raves

Rants & Raves

Finding the Web

The Future of the Web

I suppose search engines always existed, but I had used the web at least a little before I ever heard of them. These days, I think, one cannot even begin to think of the web without thinking of a search engine, or at least a part of some portal site that has an integrated search.
    But then, I get ahead of myself. Let's jump back to Netscape version 2.0, newly released, the first browser that I used… The first, I think, to resemble what we expect a Web browser to be. It was on this browser that I had my first encounter with a search engine…

I believe I was on some school field trip, one in which we were being introduced to the Internet, and we were taken (in order to find information on a topic we were researching) to the AltaVista web search engine.
    This was … new to me, to say the least. I rather liked the site, little blue mountains and the name up top, a search box, and some tips below, then the results below after your search. I made a note of it, and then moved on to the other engines the teacher was pointing out. After a couple, we actually followed up our searches and checked our information.
    I must say that I was astounded at the number of things I found… in those days, the web was much, much smaller, and yet the wealth of information was incredible. I could tell that this whole internet thing was big.

Jump ahead a few months. Now we have an Internet connection at home, through my mom's university (and AOL in my dad's house), and I'm regularly using AltaVista to look for information on my favorite games, news, and of course school papers. My brother also is also using it, mostly to find information on his new favorite game, Chrono Trigger :) …
    Anyway, I had taken to using AltaVista, my favorite search engine because it, unlike so many others, had an Advanced Search option, which used Boolean operators (AND, OR, and NOT) which I was familiar with from library searches at school and programming on my Apple IIe.
    We were using Netscape 3.0 now, I think, and JavaScript was starting to get pretty popular. I remember one of my brother's favorite Chrono Trigger sites on Geocities (which was new at the time) used a lot of JavaScript. The author even created a small game in which you fought him, doomed to lose. It was quite the rage. >>

  1. Brave New Web
  2. The World at your fingertips
  3. Through the eye of a needle
  4. New ways to search
  5. Just a Community

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