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Discussion (41 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
> The name of the website itself is a wordplay on Altavista.
Though, the creator mentions on his own page, that he is a German citizen (due to his grandfather), even though he speaks no German and have never lived there[1]; which could mean that pun is intentional. Not that it is really all that important (like not at all), but I can't help but wonder now...
[1] https://www.ericexperiment.com/about-me
It's ironic to search for "alt meaning" and find a tertiary definition of "Pitched in the first octave above the treble staff; high" which would suggest more of the Spanish "alta" root rather than the Germanic root.
Now I'm curious how much origins are shared between Spanish and German.
Perhaps we can all agree English is a goofy language!
(Of course the alta in Altavista is from Spanish "high", but that doesn't really change anything)
They did admit to being German.
Sites like this remind me the internet used to be fun, and it was glorious. Really, makes me want to bust out Frontpage 2000 and Macromedia Fireworks to build a sweet landing page for an anime fan site and setup some phpBB forums.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astalavista.box.sk
https://web.archive.org/web/20070202023521/http://www.astala...
It doesn't work properly in my Netscape Navigator.
Old'aVista, a Guide to the Old Internet - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39069910 - Jan 2024 (12 comments)
the original OG's were before the web.
https://web.archive.org/web/20190909191211/https://kb.iu.edu...
It always felt a long winded way to find stuff or was that the "sponsored content" we get now?
DMOZ was another such classification, originally launched by Mozilla and run for a time by AOL, though it closed in 2017, discussed on HN at the time <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13762362> and <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13759032>.
These were both useful and limited. Useful because early Web content-based search sucked. Altavista was the best of the bunch to my recollection, and only launched in late 1995. Google came along in (late?) 1997 and blew everyone away, I was using it by 1999. There were "sponsored content" directories, but those tended not to gain much traction as they were so obviously inferior in quality. The main directories generally avoided this taint.
The Web was far smaller, far less commercial, much less dynamic (editable / user-contributable sites were extremely rare, blogs barely existed), and pretty eclectic. Organising by category pretty much worked, as content evolved slowly, the total space was relatively small, and highlighting the Really Good Stuff was both useful and tractable. Today that's fairly intractable, though directory-like organisation might be seen in, say Wikipedia or some similar projects.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMOZ>
There are still several online directories, some general, many specialised:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_directories>