Weekend Open Forum: The first search engine I ever used

Julio Franco

Julio Franco

Posts: 9,097   +2,048
Staff member

In today's web, search is almost taken for granted. In most parts of the world it's a three way street, with Google, Bing and Yahoo taking up a majority of the search pie (plus Baidu in China). Google is by far the most dominant player worldwide and has been leading the pack for years now.

However, there was a time when searching the web was measured in (several) seconds, and honestly, results were not that good. Yahoo was a startup but was already positioned as the incumbent in a novel web filled with dozens of smaller search engines trying to grab users' attention.

Altavista was backed by Digital and tried to differentiate itself for speed, WebCrawler provided full text search and did metacrawling, Lycos combined search with quality in-house content, Infoseek's algorithm was pretty accurate in some categories (before Google, of course), Hotbot, Ask Jeeves, Excite, MSN, and the list goes on.

The other day I was listening to a podcast and they were discusing how you never forget your first search engine. I couldn't make up my mind on what was the very first -- quite possibly Yahoo, though I've never been a fan -- and I think it was a combination of Infoseek and Altavista, until Google arrived and it was an instant game changer.

So, how about you? What was the first search engine you ever used?

Masthead credit: Shutterstock

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https://www.techspot.com/news/58931-open-forum-first-search-engine-used.html

 
I honestly don't ever remember really using anything but Google. I'm 26, so I'm probably too young to have ever remembered a time when Google wasn't the dominant search engine.
 
Yahoo, Altavista and Hot Bot on that order.
I remember the first time I used google and I though what the hell is this white blank page. :D
 
We're talking late 1997 (October I think). The first I used was also Yahoo!. I remember I also used a web search program called WebFeerret and I just found out it still exists!.
 
I started off using WebCrawler and AltaVista. Of course this was 1994/1995 time frame, so Yahoo was still in its early stages, but I did switch to Yahoo! in late 1995.
 
I'm from Norway, so the first one I used was a Norwegian one called Kvasir (.no). Then Yahoo later on. I've ended up on Google, as it's usually the one that feeds me the right results.
 
I don't remember what the search engine I used was. I was housesitting for someone in I think 1996 or 97. I decided to see if there were any games on their computer and I remember clicking the Netscape Navigator icon. It was the first time I ever heard a modem dialing, and my first ever experience with the internet. I had no idea what I was doing and it was so slow, I gave up after waiting like ten minutes for a page to load and went to watch Groundhog Day instead.

I do remember using Lycos, Hotbot, Webcrawler and eventually Altavista.
 
I remember Hot bot, dogpile, and altavista. If I recall correctly Altavista was one of the first that offered language translation and I was taking German in school at the time so I used it a lot.
 
Webcrawler in the mid-90s on my cousin's computer. I think I used AltaVista for a bit before switching to Google once I got my own PC.
 
Ask Jeeves. It was 1999 and I was doing a 3rd grade report on wolves. It was the first time I had ever used my school's computer lab.
 
Yahoo and AltaVista, mid 90's, on a Commodore Amiga. Oh what fun that was configuring for the Internet, using Compuserve for dial-up...
 
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