How AltaVista, the first good search engine, fell into the digital abyss
It's hard to explain just how good Google was back in the day, compared to those early search engines.<p>I distinctly remember someone suggesting it to me at our CS lab in college. A few of us had never heard of it, and we all started to do some searches to try it out. There was silence for about 5 minutes, and then someone said "this is really good."<p>Say what you want about what Google has turned into, but it was an incredibly important tool that came around at the right time.<p>Also, it makes me really happy that they've kept the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button around.