The history of search engines

[Jobbo]

I watched this on Youtube last night. I was very nostalgic; I had forgotten most of the search engines I used to use (Excite was my go-to for some reason) and Google feels like it has been dominant forever. It's a great trawl:

[DeskJockey]

Altavista was *the* search engine until Google. Remember being blown away by how much you could find with just a few words. Had one machine hooked up to a USRobotics 56k modern in the computer shop I was working in. It was blisteringly fast!

[robin_cox]

Infoseek was the one that we gravitated to at the Manchester University biology department computer labs in 95-95 - largely because you could chuck your search term straight into the URL after the ?, so it was really quick to do a search directly compared to the other ones available at the time. Didn't last long.

[duncs500]

My memory of it was really Lycos/Yahoo and then Google came along and it became immediately clear that it was faster and delivered better results, and that was the end.

I remember Alta Vista, but don't think I used it much and I used Ask Jeeves once and thought it was shite.

[Simon]

I used to use Dogpile, which back then used to be the search engine of search engines - it threw your query at all of them and you got all the results back. Nowadays it looks like any other mediocre engine.

[integrale_evo]

It was all yahoo and dogpile when I started internetting.

Don’t really remember how, why or when google became the default.

[240PP]

Yahoo then Altavista for me before Google came about.

I seem to remember Ask Jeeves being advertised (on TV!) as if it were like ChatGPT is today

[nuttinnew]

[jamcg]

It was all yahoo and dogpile when I started internetting.

Don’t really remember how, why or when google became the default.

Once yahoo went bust and you stopped seeing keywords on adverts, and ask Jeeves went too it left google as an easy to spell and easy to remember word for people who were using the internet, who had no idea how to use the internet- you also didn’t have to manipulate your search terms for good, consistent results, plus was it the first to automatically correct your spelling when searching?


That and some of the earliest memes, in the form of fake google result pages, that were the first result on the “I’m feeling lucky” button