These day’s I’d be more worried that I’d be taken to some malware infested lookalike.

Yeah, I used to type “putty download”, click “I’m feeling lucky”, and go.

It worked 100% of the time. I wouldn’t try it these days, even if I needed putty.

Yahoo Japan is actually a completely separate company.

Yahoo itself is still extremely popular in the US, just with a different demographic than we (the sort of people on the fediverse) regularly interact with. Their sports, finance, and news sites are some of the most popular on the internet. I don’t think it’s particularly relevant in the web search space these days though, and hasn’t been for a long time.

I think we don’t hear much about it because it has found a niche and is staying within it. It’s profitable, but not on an “infinite growth forever” trajectory so it rarely makes the news. Honestly kind of respectable.

That’s overstating it. There’s a reason Google took over: it was better pretty much all around. The original Google algorithm was a really amazing tool for finding quality content on the web as it existed in those days. That was before SEO drove all these focused efforts on gaming the system.

With that said, Alta Vista definitely was the most promising tool before Google, and it had some potential if it hadn’t been so poorly managed by DEC. They simply saw it as a cool demo for their Alpha server platform, and never had any vision for it as a meaningful product on its own.

Something that clearly doesn’t resonate with mainstream social media users at all.

I’ve actually seen quite a few people and organizations moving back to Twitter. While these are just a few anecdotes, I suspects there’s a trend. I can’t explain it.