[jonathankoren]

WRT to curated directories, in the late 90s when Google came (along with others like Northern Light), it was clear that both directories (Yahoo and Moz in particular) and the established search providers (Yahoo, AltaVista, Metacrawler, etc.) were being overwhelmed.

Yahoo (aka Inktomi) search frequently took multiple pages of to find anything of quality. Curated directories were missing quite a bit. Furthermore, if I remember correctly there was some sort of payola scandal around Moz/OpenDirectory editors.

The market was primed for a better solution, and PageRank provided it.

[Scoundreller]

I always laughed when I saw « Powered by Inktomi », like, why does this company I’ve never heard of want to be associated with this ?

[jonathankoren]

Inktomi was pretty good then. In fact they powered both Yahoo and Microsoft web search at the time. When they were acquired by Yahoo, they formed the basis of Yahoo search, that was well respected in the search research community for years until Yahoo started to implode.