15. (Ch 4.1) The Early Search Engines And Yahoo
Internet History Podcast
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The Ineffectiveness of Search Engines in the Early Internet Era
Being first or at least near the top of a search could bring a lot of traffic for doing basically nothing but showing up. Webmasters and people that were publishing websites were thus greatly incentivized to rank themselves highly. The dominant player in search at this early part of the internet era was not strictly a search engine at all but a directory compiled by actual human beings.
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