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Search Wars: Episode 2 | Andreessen Horowitz

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Back in 1996, Wired ran a piece on the battle between different search providers during the early days of the internet. The big takeaway from that period (pre-Google, pre-PageRank) was that all the startups were approaching internet search in wildly different ways. Yahoo had a catalog-like approach, where sites had to be painstakingly classified by human workers. Inktomi, a long forgotten search backend, used rudimentary crawlers and indexed results based on an in-house textual relevance algorithm. Excite was a user-facing search portal, which took an inverted index of the web and clustered sites with roughly similar profiles together (this was judged linguistically). It was a simpler time: in some ways, working on search in the ‘90s was more like being a librarian than a research engineer. But all of those startups were left in the dust by Google, which was founded two years later in 1998. Google’s PageRank algorithm used the number of backlinks to judge a website’s legitimacy, and qu

Search Wars: Episode 2 | Andreessen Horowitz Infra Search Wars: Episode 2 Jason Cui, Jennifer Li, Sarah Wang, and Stephenie Zhang Posted November 13, 2025 Subscribe Share Share Email X LinkedIn Facebook Hacker News WhatsApp Flipboard Reddit Search Wars: Episode 2 Table of Contents Share Share Email X LinkedIn Facebook Hacker News WhatsApp Flipboard Reddit Back in 1996, Wired ran a piece on the battle between different search providers during the early days of the internet. The big takeaway from that period (pre-Google, pre-PageRank) was that all the startups were approaching internet search in

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