What the Internet Was Like in 1998

3 months ago 1

It's 1998, the middle of the dot-com boom. Portals are advertising on TV, web developers are fighting browser companies, Microsoft and Amazon are gaining power, and Netscape is going open source.

By Richard MacManus | July 15, 2025 | Tags: Dot-com, Yearly Reviews, 1998

Yahoo 1998 tv advert Do you Yahoo!?; a 1998 TV advert.

For web users, 1998 was all about which portal you frequented. Was it Yahoo! with its massive directory of links (and partnership with the search engine AltaVista)? Was it the browser company portals, MSN or Netcenter? Was it the VC-funded Excite or Lycos? All of them wanted your eyeballs and ran terrible adverts on tv to get them.

Web business was booming, but it was also becoming obvious which companies were winning and which were losing. Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser continued to drain users from Netscape, forcing the younger company to make a drastic move: open source its technology. Meanwhile, an ambitious e-tailer named Amazon.com expanded beyond books in 1998 — bad news for its competitors.

Dot-com fever continued apace, with GeoCities (August) and eBay (September) among the high-profile IPOs in 1998. Not to mention a little company called Google starting in September.

GeoCities, July 1998 (the month before the company's IPO).

The State of Web Design

By 1998, web design had achieved a harmony of form and function, after the widely varying experiments of 1997.

In January 1998, Wired's head of design Jeffrey Veen presented his web design manifesto. "Today’s Web is slipping into a proprietary world of competing technologies, and only by understanding this dilemma at its core can those creating content come out ahead," he wrote, referencing the browser incompatibilities of Netscape Navigator and Microsoft's IE.

HotWired, February 1998; via Wayback Machine.

Veen's manifesto could be summed up with the maxim "form follows function," meaning that a website must have a structure (function) before presentation is applied (form).

Veen also emphasized the importance of simplicity. He likened web design to designing children's toys:

"Simple, bright, playful - the Web has a different aesthetic than most other media does, but it is similar, surprisingly, to that of children's toys. Both design aesthetics come from forms of limited bandwidth..."

Webmonkey CSS Quick Reference Guide, 1998; via Chris Casciano on Flickr.

As the web platform matured over 1998 — CSS 2, XML and DOM all got finalised in standards bodies this year — web design began to achieve the sophistication that designers like Veen and his contemporary Jeffrey Zeldman craved.

The Browser War is Won

If web design was reaching an equilibrium in 1998, the same couldn't be said about the contest between Netscape and Microsoft for browser supremacy. There would only be one winner.

On January 22, 1998, Netscape announced its “bold plans to make the source code for the next generation of its highly popular Netscape Communicator client software available for free licensing on the Internet.” This was the beginnings of Mozilla, a non-profit organisation that was unveiled at the end of March 1998.

Marc Andreessen announcing Mozilla, March 31, 1998.

It was a desparate — yet ultimately savvy — move by Netscape to open source not only its browser, but its suite of online products connected to the browser (email, calendar, etc.). It was fast losing ground to Microsoft, whose Internet Explorer browser was now pre-installed on the world’s dominant OS: Windows.

Not that Microsoft had everything go its way in 1998. In May, the Department of Justice and 20 states sued the company for bundling IE with Windows. The antitrust trial opened in October.

By the end of the year, Netscape had been sold to AOL — Microsoft had won the war. But at least Mozilla emerged from the ashes.

A printout of AOL's homepage on the day it acquired Netscape; via Joe Loong on Flickr.

Web Developers Fight Back

Meanwhile, web developers were becoming increasingly frustrated over 1998 at the empty promises of the browser companies. Both Netscape and Microsoft gave lip service to implementing standards, yet they continued to focus on their own proprietary features.

To fight back against browser incompatibilities, in August 1998 The Web Standards Project (which came to be known as WaSP) was launched by a group of independent web developers.

WaSP homepage, December 1998 (a Jeffrey Zeldman design); via Wayback Machine.

The WaSP group was concerned that the beta versions of Netscape’s Navigator 4.5 and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 5.0 were “adding more proprietary enhancements without providing complete support for existing standards.” It also called out the “patchwork support” for the DOM — the Document Object Model, a method of programmatically interacting with a web page — in these upcoming browsers.

Although these problems weren't immediately solved, WaSP’s mix of advocacy and public shaming over the coming years would help ensure that web standards eventually won out.

Amazon Expansion

In June 1998, Amazon branched out from books and began to sell CDs on its now expanding e-commerce website. As The New York Times reported on June 11, Amazon’s music catalog contained “more than 100,000 CD's, with 225,000 songs to sample using Real Audio.” The article mentioned that CDnow, Music Boulevard and Tower Records “are already far ahead of Amazon.” But given Amazon’s reputation for big spending, there was reason for those companies to be concerned. Amazon was just over a year old as a public company and had huge losses every quarter. But it was growing, fast.

Amazon website, October 1998 Amazon.com, October 1998 — note the 'Music' tab; via NIST / Version Museum.

The following month, Amazon acquired two non-book companies: Junglee and Planet All. It was, said the Times in another article, “a move indicating that its aspirations extend to selling far more than books over the Internet.” The same report noted that Amazon.com had “grown to be the most successful merchant on the Internet, with 3.1 million customers.”

In October, with their stock prices tanking, CDnow and N2K merged — but it wouldn't matter, because Amazon had already won.

etail stocks, October 1998 CNN Money illustration of CD e-tailer sharemarket trends, October 23, 1998.

Portals

“Portal” was, as Wired put it in a September profile of Excite, “the season's hot buzzword.” CEO George Bell defined a portal as “an efficient starting point that allows you to cut through the confusion of the Web and get to the information you want.”

Excite was engaged in a “land grab” to “become that starting point,” Bell said. The web at this time had a frontier mentality and so land grabbing was an increasingly common metaphor used by entrepreneurs. Fuelled by venture capital and IPOs, companies like Excite had a grow-at-all-costs strategy — with the hope that once they’d grabbed enough virtual land, they could then extract rent from its users. Excite’s goal, said Bell, was to “get big fast.”

Excite web portal, April 1998.

Unfortunately for Excite, it struggled to keep up with the likes of Yahoo! and AOL. It eventually sold to a large cable ISP company called @Home Network in January 1999.

Search

During 1998, the leading names in search were either portals (Yahoo, Netscape, Excite) or search engines trying to turn themselves into portals (AltaVista, Infoseek, Lycos).

AltaVista was the most popular pure search engine of its time (not counting directories like Yahoo!). It had a destination site — for most of 1998 located at altavista.digital.com — but it also syndicated its search technology to partners like Yahoo and Netscape. So while many users visited AltaVista directly, a large proportion of search query volume came from its presence on these popular portals.

DEC's AltaVista search engine, April 1998.

For much of the year, Google was merely an academic project. It gathered some attention, including from Danny Sullivan’s Search Engine Watch, but to break through Google had to become a company and move off Stanford's web servers. So on September 4, 1998, founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin filed for incorporation.

By the end of 1998, a "beta" website was up and running on google.com.

Google in December 1998.

Things would never be the same again in search, or on the web. AltaVista (now owned by Compaq) didn't yet know it, but 1998 was the peak year for portals. It was the end of an era — going forward, directories were out and search was in.