Search engine history

[whateverpedia]

(Not sure if this is the best forum for this particular thread, if it isn't then could one of the mods please move it to one more appropriate.)

 

Found this on the interwebz this morning and found it interesting. It outlines the history of search engines from something called Archie (archive without the v), through to the space dominated by Google.

From my own perspective, I first got online in the mid 90's when Alta Vista, Excite and Lycos were dominant, and Yahoo was an upstart, and there was one that focused purely on results from Australia and New Zealand called Anzwers (quite a clever name given what it did).

After a time, i ended up using a utility called Web Ferret that actually crawled through the various search engines giving searchers the "best" results from all of them. I didn't become aware of Google until about the turn of the millennium/century, and have used nothing else since (like most of the rest of the world).

Full article here: The History Of Search Engines.

 

 

How about everyone else? What did you use back in the day? Something different, or did you follow the evolution of SE's and end up with Google like I did? Or did you get online when Google was already the dominant SE?

[whateverpedia]

In case anyone is wondering, the very first word I ever put into an SE was "Rush". I was looking for something on the Canadian hard/prog rock band. I was baffled as to why the results seemed to be evenly split between the band and something called a "Limbaugh". I had no idea what a "limbaugh" was, and I wish I still didn't, however we all have to lose our innocence eventually.

[Mike Friedman]

I was using AltaVista and Yahoo. Not really sure when I ended up on Google, but once I did, I never went back to anything else. 

I forgot about Cuil. I remember when news of that came out people were speculating they were going to do Google better than Google. That hasn't seemed to pan out. Haven't heard of them since. 

WordStream didn't give DuckDuckGo any love. That was supposed to be another Google killer. 

 

[Wunderkind]

1 hour ago, Mike Friedman said:

WordStream didn't give DuckDuckGo any love. That was supposed to be another Google killer. 

 

I wanted to like DuckDuckGo, but you know what really turned me off to them? It was the way their owner talked about the competition. It is just a pet peeve of mine. When all you do is talk down about your competitors, I just have no interest in what you are offering.

Take the high road.

It's a pretty simple formula.

"XYZ does a great job of blah, blah, blah and they are a great company, but here is what sets us apart and why you should give us a chance.... feature, benefit, feature, benefit."

[deezn]

I liked webcrawler the best

[Guest]

I was online back in the 70's and 80's, long before the "Web" which is but one type of "Protocol" for connecting to remote computers. Jumping into the early nineties, it was actually really easy to get listed in the various SE's - usually,  within hours. Back then, SEO was the wild, wild west...SE's weren't the best place to go to find sites - instead, you went to website A and found links to websites B, C and D. From there, you continued to navigate from site to site to find whatever tweaked your interest. 

Google initially exploited a very simple concept - if a particular web site was really cool, a lot of other sites would link to it. Thus, their "Page Rank" for determining a site's popularity. However, it wasn't sustainable, which is why SEO has become so complex today.