[gumballindie]

> Yes they were, because geocities didn't control your search results

No but altavista and metacrawler did.

Then there came google, heavily subsidised by vc money. Deep pockets. Then that turned out to be unsustainable and so they began controlling search results and showing excessive ads.

If we want an ad free internet we need to pay for services or have government provided alternatives.

There’s no in between i am afraid. Servers and engineers cost money.

I wouldnt mind spending 10£ a month for a proper search engine service with a means to stay connected with friends. That would also reduce bot generated content.

[lkrubner]

But people didn't rely on search, as much, back then. I belonged to a few forums, and I'd visit one or two portals, almost every day as my starting point on the Web, and from there people would be recommending things, and I'd follow that. All through the 90s and into the early 00s, it was sites such as Everything and Digg and Slashdot that drove all traffic. Search-as-in-Altavista was ineffective, so people didn't rely on it. We all relied on certain forums, and those drove traffic in a more organic way. Of stuff we have nowadays, Reddit almost recreates that old world, but Reddit now operates in a context where online traffic has concentrated into 2 sites: Google and Facebook. There is no way to escape the current context, that traffic is now massively concentrated. There was a certain freedom to the 90s, in that no site could reliably capture even 1% of the Web traffic, a situation that we idealistically thought would last forever.

[plagiarist]

If you paid for that it would be less than a decade before that company was also doing the same bullshit and also collecting a subscription. Look at what is happening to streaming. "Oh, $10/mo for basically all the content, that's a no-brainer." Now it's returning to the cable television experience with ads every 10 minutes.

[gumballindie]

Very true. And when that happens i will gladly switch.