I miss Google from when it first started getting popular and overtaking Alta Vista and the other search engines. It feels weird to say now, but it truly felt like magic how it provided such better search results than its competitors. I wasn't tied to any one search engine then, and many of my searches were done on multiple search engines, with lots of wading through results to _attempt_ to find relevance. But with Google, almost every time, its results were almost exactly what I was looking for.
Though I guess it's not so much the site itself I miss, but the feeling of witnessing magic, for a little while, until I just got used to and expected such good search results.
I'm the opposite - I miss alta vista...
I miss a search engine with a real _search_ language that gave me the results I actually _asked_ for rather then just randomly picking stuff that matches half the query and stuffing the page with paid results.
Do you want to work on one? I've got a secret searcher project I've been doing for about 12 years I'm finally ready to do something with. It works on about a 1.7TB corpus right now, returns results in a few seconds on a single 3rd generation i5. I'm thinking of putting real work and money behind it now
Yes, at the time the magic was also clean and uncorrupted by SEO — Google’s algorithm sidestepped the SEO targeted at simpler search engines. And then the arms race began to get to the top of google’s search results, which probably encumbers the algorithm today.
Though I guess it's not so much the site itself I miss, but the feeling of witnessing magic, for a little while, until I just got used to and expected such good search results.