A new start page, but not StartPage...

[lovingboth]

It's long enough ago that I can't quite remember when I first used the web. It was before December 1995 though, because I remember the delight at the launch of the search engine AltaVista with the original altavista.digital.com address. (It was yet another thing I discovered via cix.)

In comparison to directories like Yahoo!, it just gave you the results for the search you wanted to do, and did so quickly. Very often they were what you wanted and it was rare I needed to look past the first page.

Unfortunately, their algorithm was vulnerable to key word stuffing - I remember an old page by Marcus that pointedly went through every possible variation of 'bisexual' and use of it as an adjective more than once in an attempt to improve its ranking.

Unfortunately (again) Compaq, who'd merged with (i.e. bought) Digital in 1998 decided to try and turn it into a 'portal', just like Yahoo! Rather than being somewhere you'd go to first, it'd be somewhere you stayed. Think of the increased ad revenue!

The combination of the two problems meant that the arrival of search engine Google at just this time meant that it became the home page for my browser. At least at the start, PageRank got rid of key word stuffed rubbish appearing at the top of the results and Google just gave you the results you wanted without trying to get you to stay on the site.

Obviously, both those problems have returned with a vengance and it's the AI slop that's the worst for me.

So my default search engine is now Qwant. Not perfect, but I'm a lot happier with it.

While I'm complaining about Google, I still haven't forgiven them for killing Google Reader (part of trying to force everyone to use G+, apparently) and the deliberate hobbling of adblockers in Chrome means I'm even more pleased about having stuck with Firefox than I was before.

In another first and combining the two, I adapted someone else's Firefox extension to add StartPage.com - which was the second place in the 'which search engine now' thoughts - as a search engine to do the same for Qwant and put it on github.