Google in 2000
What search engine did you use in 2000? It's very likely that the answer is not Google. Three months before Google became the default search provider for Yahoo, Google's search results looked slightly different than they look today. Google showed relevant categories from DMOZ …
Context & Ripple Effects
This retrospective lands at a hinge point the corpus has circled before: the same blog ran a counterfactual on what the web would look like without Google in mid-2006, and this piece supplies the historical baseline for that argument. The snapshot it describes — results pages mixing DMOZ categories into rankings — dates from just before the confirmed moment Google became Yahoo's default search provider, the deal that converted a promising engine into the web's de facto answer layer.
The detail matters because it captures a transitional design: Google was still visibly borrowing the human-curated directory model that Yahoo itself pioneered, while its algorithmic core was quietly making that model redundant.
First-order effects
- Yahoo handing its default search slot to Google immediately routes Yahoo's massive query volume through Google's index, making Google's relevance ranking the experience millions of users associate with search.
- Google's display of DMOZ categories keeps human-edited curation visible inside algorithmic results, giving the open directory project reach it could never have earned on its own.
Second-order effects
- As users learn they can go straight to Google, the intermediaries — Yahoo's own directory and DMOZ-style curation generally — lose the browsing traffic that justified manual categorization.
- Rival engines face pressure to compete on ranking quality rather than directory breadth, since the Yahoo deal signals that distribution deals will be won on relevance, not portal real estate.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, search consolidates around algorithmic ranking as the primary navigation layer of the web, demoting hand-built taxonomies like DMOZ and Yahoo's directory to niche tools.
- Control over the default search slot becomes a strategic asset in itself, prefiguring the distribution-and-defaults battles that define the search market's economics.
The trend: Web search is shifting from human-edited directories toward algorithmic engines, with default-placement deals like Yahoo's accelerating Google's consolidation of the category.