Would AltaVista Have Ranked Your Blog? I Dug Up 1998 Search Logic and Pointed It at 2025's Web

Somewhere in the back of my brain, next to the lyrics to the Saved by the Bell theme song, lives the memory of typing my first search query into AltaVista. It was 1998. I was looking for cheat codes for a video game, and the results were, frankly, a disaster. But they were an honest disaster. The web was young, the algorithm was dumb, and nobody had figured out how to lie to it yet.

Which got me thinking: what if I took the crude ranking logic of that era — keyword relevance, title matching, link counts, none of the fancy stuff — and pointed it at the modern web? What would 1998's dumb-but-honest search engine make of 2025's SEO-slop content farms, AI-generated listicles, and 'authentic' personal blogs?

Spoiler: the machines from before Y2K were not impressed.

The Rules of the Game

For the purposes of this experiment, I built a crude scoring rubric based on how early search engines actually worked. No machine learning, no behavioral signals, no 'dwell time.' Just the basics:

• Keyword relevance: Does the page say what it claims to be about? Not 40 times. Just... clearly, somewhere near the top.
• Title honesty: Does the title describe the content, or is it a cliffhanger?
• Link count: How many independent sites link to it? Not sponsored. Not syndicated. Actual humans, actually linking.
• Content uniqueness: Would this page be redundant if it vanished tomorrow?

That last one is the killer. In 1998, the web was small enough that you could roughly tell if a page was just a reworded version of another page. Today, entire industries exist to publish reworded versions of other pages at scale.

Running the Modern Web Through 1998 Logic

First up: a random selection of SaaS marketing pages. You know the type — 'Supercharge Your Workflow With AI-Powered Synergy.' Under AltaVista-era logic, these pages score embarrassingly poorly. They don't clearly state what the product does until paragraph four, they're stuffed with vague superlatives ('seamless,' 'revolutionary,' 'game-changing'), and their inbound links are mostly from press-release syndication farms. A 1998 crawler would rank this below a random GeoCities fan page about Beanie Babies that at least had the decency to say 'Beanie Babies' in the first sentence.

Next: AI-generated blog posts. I grabbed twenty articles from content farms that publish 400 posts a day. Under my retro rubric, they all fail the uniqueness test catastrophically. They're the same article, syndicated across forty domains, each one a slightly different shade of beige. In 1998, this was called 'search engine spam,' and it got you banned. In 2025, it's called 'a content strategy.'

And then — the fun part — I ran a handful of genuinely good personal sites. A guy documenting his restoration of a 1972 Honda CB750. A woman who reviews every frozen pizza sold at Hy-Vee. A retired librarian's blog about native plants in the Pacific Northwest. You know what happened? They crush. Clear titles. Real content. Actual inbound links from forums and webrings and, yes, Reddit threads. The old algorithm loves them, because they're the kind of pages the old algorithm was built to find.

The Old Link Graph Was Harder to Fool

Here's the uncomfortable thesis underneath all of this: the early web's crude metrics were, in some ways, more honest than today's sophisticated ones. A link in 1998 meant someone, somewhere, thought your page was worth visiting. There was no industry of link-building agencies, no sponsored post economy, no engagement-farming playbook. The web was too small and too weird for the grift to scale.

Today's metrics — engagement, dwell time, click-through rate — are all behavioral, and behavior can be manufactured. You can't easily fake a 1972 Honda restoration diary. You can absolutely fake 10,000 'users' spending 45 seconds on a listicle about the 15 Best Air Fryer Accessories (You Won't Believe #7).

There's a reason the 'Dead Internet' theory has legs, even if it's overstated. When the ranking signals reward volume and engagement over substance, you get a web optimized for volume and engagement. The 1998 algorithm was too dumb to be gamed at scale. That's not nostalgia talking — it's just an observation about incentive structures.

What We Can Actually Steal From This

I'm not saying we should bring back AltaVista. I'm saying there's a useful question buried in its dumb logic: would this page survive if the only signal that mattered was whether a real human found it useful?

If you write for the web, in 2025, the retro rubric is a decent editorial filter. Does your title say what the thing is? Does the first paragraph get to the point? Would anyone link to this voluntarily? Would the internet be worse off without it? If the answers are 'no, no, no, and no,' you're not writing content — you're filing it.

The web got bigger, faster, and smarter. But somewhere along the way, 'useful to a person' stopped being the primary optimization target. The old search engines were crude, ugly, and occasionally ranked a Beanie Babies fan page above IBM. But they were looking for the right thing.

We just stopped looking for it too.