1996 or so: altavista.digital.com! I loved (and got pretty good at due to daily training, heh) using boolean operations to find whatever I wanted. No Google back then.
Nowadays Google finds so much noise that I wish I could use boolean operations once again to weed out the spam.
Slashdot is one for the ages. I quit cold when I realized I was a karma addict. It was the first website which I kept open in a tab and hit refresh on.
I also came to love penny arcade and the filthy movie reviews linked off slashdot homepage. Thanks for your effort.
I know you are an active user here, but this comment reminded me those users on Slashdot who would only comment when there is a user id competition (ie. who has the lowest id).
This is why I loved slashdot and now hacker news. You're discussing some technology/framework/... and the local god of the ecosystem drops in and says hi.
You wrote "altavista", and I heard "astalatista" which was a site I followed, for the cracks and reverse-engineering content.
Astalavista and +Fravia's reverse engineering sites were a lot of fun to follow back in the day, when reverse engineering anti-piracy dongles that plugged into your PC's parallel-port.
I miss the old Google, back before it got gamed and curated to hell, and it felt like you could find what you wanted to find as long as it was on the net.
I used altavista long after google had become the hip new thing. I liked it, because for certain searches I knew what results I would get back. Which is to say I knew how to look for things I wanted to find.
Google was smarter but seemed less intuitive to me to get at what I wanted.
I do... being able to craft a query that returned _just_ what you wanted and not having to wade thru 10 pages of results because 'page rank' put all the really good stuff on page 5+....
Nowadays Google finds so much noise that I wish I could use boolean operations once again to weed out the spam.
Also liked slashdot.org in its early days.