And before, how did they ? The question may seem strange, almost incongruous as Google has cleared, for those of you who have discovered the Internet in the 1990s, the memories almost traumatic of the research ” before “. Nobody wants to relive that.
At the time, the very choice to use a search engine was not at all self-evident. Technology lighthouse, it was the directory : hundreds of links, grouped into categories, sub-categories, and sub-sub-categories. Updated by hand, by employees of Yahoo! or other. We dipped a little bit by chance, in quest of a good Web site devoted to the subject on which you wanted information. It was effective enough to find a forum for water polo or a site of recipes of cakes ; it was a lot less likely to find accurate information.
To detect these, it was necessary to actually go through an engine. The process was long and tedious : we went in his research, trial and error. How does one speak to a search engine ? The question may seem trivial today, but was far from obvious. “I am looking for what year started the Vietnam war” do you take him to nowhere. “War in Vietnam” gave better results, but was not precise enough. We added, we took away the words a bit at random. We compared “early war Vietnam “with” war in Vietnam the beginning “, before you resolve to test ” beginning Vietnam War “. The boolean operators, the so-called ” + ” and ” – ” to refine his search, was a technology in its infancy, introduced by AltaVista, and still mysterious to almost everyone.
Time lost crucial
