Comparing 1998 AltaVista search results to a library card catalog

I remember spending a whole evening on AltaVista in 1998 trying to find a specific Star Trek fanfic, and I got about 40 pages of junk before giving up. My local library's card catalog would have had me in the right section in maybe 10 minutes, ha. But then again, the library didn't have that one weird forum post from a guy in Ohio who had the exact answer I needed a week later. What search engine back then did you all actually trust for finding anything useful? Was it Yahoo's directory or did you just memorize chat room URLs instead?

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tessa_kim317d ago

Man, I gotta disagree with you there. AltaVista was a mess, sure, but it also found me stuff in seconds that the card catalog never could. One time I dug up a scanned zine about a local punk band from 1984 that no library on earth would have. Yahoo directories felt like wandering a maze of someone else's opinions, and honestly, half the links were dead by the time you clicked them. I'll take 40 pages of junk over 10 minutes of hunting for a card that might not even exist. The chaos was part of the fun, you know?