[scoot]

> Around the time Google pagerank came around, the Yahoo-style search engines were highly curated

Hmmm, no. Altavista was the go-to search engine at the time (launched 1995), and was a crawler (i.e. not a curated catalog/directory) based search. Lycos predates that but had keyword rather than natural language search.

Google didn't launch until 1998.

[eek2121]

Hotbot was amazing back in the day. Google scored me post high school schoolin', however, so I won't complain...Shoot Google helped me make the local news back in the day!