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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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Was there a search engine before Google? I'm no spring chicken (I can remember when computers had black screens with orange text and started at "C:" instead of a desktop) but I don't remember anything compelling before Google. I think I knew that Altavista existed but don't actually remember using it.
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Oh yeah (continued from reply #102) - I think I actually used WebCrawler in the 1990s
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lycos
altavista
aol
yahoo
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I have used info.com for years now. I collects the search results from Google, Yahoo. Bing, Ask and About and presents them in a compiled page. It just doesn't make sense to use just one search engine when a metasearch engine like info.com can collect results from multiple search engines for you.
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Gopher
10 chars.....
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I'm using Bing more, now that Google is screwing up their results page with unusable mini-instant previews that inadvertently pop-up when I never want them too.
Bing's ok, not the best, but it's cleaner than google.
fyi, I used to use altavista and askjeeves
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I also used AltaVista but now I actually use compact GooPlusPlus more often than Google. Not only does it include all the Google stuff but also a lot more specific niche search tools.
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Altavista --------------------------------
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I can't even remember!!
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Staff
Metacrawler.
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DarKSeeD said:
Altavista
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Yahoo! (which my Japanese friends tell me is still more popular than Google in Japan)
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