this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2026
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DeGoogle Yourself
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I still remember when Google launched, the uncluttered homepage was the real differentiator, other search engines, especially AltaVista, were just as good at the time, but they would load their homepage with as much extra stuff as they could think of to attract people. Then Google came along with a quirky name (for the time) and a uniquely minimalist look that broke all the established rules, it wasn't necessarily better search at that point but it really looked different. Different times of course, a search engine was just another website, no different to your own personal page.
As far as I remember Alta Vista was ok at the beginning, but soon people figured out that you can get to the top result if you just repeat your top keywords multiple times in the meta Keywords tag. Another trick was to just add "free, mp3, sex" to each pages meta keywords to get more traffic. At this point Google was better, and also would load much faster on dialup than the image heavy sites like yahoo or Alta Vista.
So where do I go for my free mp3 sex now?
soulseek
I liked dogpile back in the late 90s because it would aggregate from several sources and wasn't terribly cluttered comparatively. I think I swapped to Google around 2000ish because it was so minimalist.
...i used dogpile for awhile back when the market fostered a healthy ecosystem of competing search engines, but at some point in the late nineties it quickly became apparent that its best results were all coming from google, so i cut out the middleman...
...i quit using google maybe fifteen years later, after they fully embraced evil; unfortunately the search market still hasn't recovered from google's dominance...