Netscape was a powerful browser and search engine ( conspiracy )

submitted by Conspirologist

Netscape was a powerful browser and search engine. The only search engine as powerful was AltaVista. Now both Netscape and AltaVista are gone. Young people don't even know who the fuck they were. This is how the end of free internet begun.

43770

All any website needs to do is create their own meta data descriptions. Any new search engine can be created and offer website owners a specific tag or code snippet to place on their website and the new search engine would be just as fast and valuable as any other.

example: voat.co could

meta data = "run by cia faggots on tuesdays, run by nsa faggots on thursdays" johnnyUSAsearchEngine = "follow" johnnyUSAsearchEngine = "user generated content and submission forum"

Anyone could create a search engine and crawl for specific meta data only, and create their own indices without being called "dark web" or some other fake scare tactics.

sn0wbawl

you, ultimately were part of that transition. we all were really. Netscape still exists, in a bastardized way, as Firefox. Alta vista was my primary for a long time then used yahoo until it was essentially trash and had started using google for simplicity.

ultimately, the people using the net are responsible for how it was shaped. not really a conspiracy, just a flooding by non-technical or uncaring users.

the real travesty is that young tech savvy people today don't remember an internet that wasn't full of morons

STACKS88

When Google came out, it delivered far superior search results for one very simple reason. It counted an incoming link to a page as a vote for that page. Pages with the most votes ranked highest in the search results.

Search engines pre-Google didn't use this as a factor in their algos, and so their results were very hit and miss, and easily manipulatable.

Judgejewdy

oh the irony...

european

Pagerank

bosunmoon

I was a northernlights kinda guy.

Fateswebb

netscape is basically firefox today... part of netscape split off and founded mozilla in 1998. So while netscape itself isn't officially around anymore, it still has a fire(fox) burning.

RedditSuxBalls

That's not quite true. My understanding is that they chucked out most of the code base for Netscape when they went with a different rendering engine called Gecko. Apparently the actual code for Navigator was a hot mess with most of it getting chucked out. And it should be mentioned that at the time Navigator referred to a whole suite of applications that included email, newsreader and a push application - do remember that crap?

They then tried to push Mozilla as being some sort of API for application framework for creating web based apps or some shit. Which I suppose was to distract from how up it's own asshole the whole thing had become.

At the point where Firefox was created, it was more as a way of trying to salvage the project as, well, being a web browser. Which was all what anyone wanted out of them to begin with. In fact the original name was Phoenix before they had to change it for copyright reasons, which should tell you everything.

Thinking back it's actually scary to think that Internet Explorer was actually the best browser that you could have used.

Fateswebb

but weren't the final version(s) of netscape actually based on mozilla (rather than the other way around) youre right I just wanted the browser and never gave a crap about the email client or any other parts of the suite.

I have never thought of explorer as the best browser, only the most convenient, and most supported at first. I still prefer firefox actually. but may actually use IE more because its (or edge is) always there on windows.

progressbin

Not a search engine. The default search engines for Netscape were Infoseek, Inktomi, then Google.

thebassdude

I used them both and liked them. I figured out how to log in to CompuServe, then use Netscape instead of the CS interface (it was actually pretty simple). At one point we had a Netware 3.12 and a NT4 server with two 14.4 modems on two POTS lines ganged together, running TCP/IP and IPX/NetX on the same LAN. 10BASE2. It was a beautiful thing when everything worked. It's all long gone now.

Diggernicks

Aol browser>all

Metanoiac

Altavista was my go to in the late 90s. I missed it when it went away.