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WOF: What search engine did you use before Google?
There's no denying Google's dominance in the search engine market. The Mountain View giant currently holds somewhere between 80-90% of the global search market, depending on where you get your numbers, and is almost as dominant in the U.S. alone with a 66% share, according to the latest comScore report. It's become so present in our lives that the word 'google' itself is commonly used as a verb and has even made it to the Oxford and Merriam-Webster dictionaries.
Besides carrying one of the world's most powerful brands, for many of us Google also drives the technology behind our email, instant messaging, calendar, mapping tool and whatnot. Not bad for a company with little over 10 years of life, many of us have been surfing the web longer than that. Which brings the question: Speaking specifically of web search, what were you using before Google came along? Or if you don't rely on Google today, what's your preferred search engine?
For me it was mostly Altavista, but before that I also used to check Lycos, HotBot, WebCrawler and the Yahoo Directory.
User Comments: 112
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There were search engines before Google? I don't know what I used. I remember visiting askjeeves, dogpile, metacrawler and other various ones but didn't use them extensively because I never really found what I wanted...until Google
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Dogpile
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I don't remember using another search engine aside from Google. In the middle to late 90's, when I needed to look something up, I remember using a Webster dictionary, some Readers Digest reference books and an old set of encyclopedias from my college days. Back then I was running the Netscape browser on a crappy dial-up connection and manual search was definitely faster.
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Altavista and Hotbot.
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0192837465 said:
yahoo
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treetops said:
yahoooooooo
late 90s yahoo commercials got me
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Google for me
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yahoo for me!
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KG363 said:
Ask Jeeves
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WinXPert said:
i've also used webferret for a while but that was after google.
FYI google's search engine was formerly called backrub
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Mostly hotbot, sometimes lycos.
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I used Altavista until about a year after Google came out. Stuck with Google ever since.
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siiix said:
yahoo and occasionally altavista and msn... how can google just be 80% right now ? its not that google is that great, its more like the others are completely useless, cant see anyone using anything else at the moment
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Oh lawd, that was so long ago. Dogpile, I think? I remember some more like Jeeves, Alta Vista, and InfoSeek, but Dogpile sticks out the most in my memory.
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Yahoo first. If I didnt find what I needed there I went to Altavista. That was around 1996/7 when I first got on the internet. I changed to google around 2000. It was less to type in
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TitoBXNY said:
I used Hotbot and Yahoo. Then Google changed the world. Bing seems ok, but i still Google.
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LNCPapa said:
Altavista and Dogpile
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Ask Jeeves for me. That was probably the first thing on the internet I used.
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T77 said:
i got my first pc in 2002 and since then i use only google and i didnt know of any other alternative back then.:p
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AltaVista.
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unrealmp3 said:
AltaVista
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taimuraly said:
I used Altavista too. So far after scanning the comments I have counted about 25 users of Altavista (including the Author) that switched to Google =)
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altavista until '04 or so then google. also used to use babelfish quite frequently until '08 or so when google translate became a better option for me. now it's still google although I hate it when I travel to a new country and can't get out of local language (i do know the fix, but it's still frustrating)
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used yahoo! before but they show a lot of information
i really don't care about.
so i switched to google where everytime i load the homepage,
it will only show the logo and the search bar...
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Astavista, hotbot and in the end copernic multi search search engines software that combined results from all search search engines that ware then online
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