don't forget the greatest webdevs of the late 90s...Larry and Sergey
people now don't seem to appreciate how much Google's radically simple homepage changed the web
look at web design right before Google took off - it was always about adding more to the page, and most sites were a mess
Larry and Sergey showed that radical simplicity was literally worth a trillion dollars
The simplicity was nice, but people switched to Google because of PageRank.
right, but they could have polluted the google.com page with endless garbage based off of the popularity of search....but they didn't
for example...they could have dropped some links below the search bar to some homegrown sports site they set up...and that would have become the most popular sports site...its hard for most people to resist that
You have a point. Here's what Alta Vista looked like.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltaVista
Google's simplicity and clarity became part of the brand. No one else was doing that at the time. Even "efficient" designs were maximalist, so extreme minimalism with a splash of colour was a real innovation.
When AltaVista first appeared its landing page was much sparser than that. Even a year earlier [0] its homepage was pretty sparse and simple. Unfortunately AltaVista got hit with the web portal bug and the site got more bloated. Unfortunately the search also got worse as spammers figured out how to game its search algorithms.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/19980423064646/http://altavista....
and not having sponsored links back then
I remember thinking that “The Google” was onto something, when my friends told me that they were replacing AltaVista with it, as their main search engine.
I started using Google after reading an article about it on Time Magazine sometime in '99.