Weekend Open Forum: The first search engine I ever used

[Guest]

I remember AltaVista as the one returning the closest results to what I was searching. Before Google, it was very difficult for a search engine to return what the user was looking for, even in the first 10 results.
AltaVista for sure was good and Yahoo also. I remember also using Webcrawler, Lycos and Metacrawler.

 

[risc32]

First...? maybe yahoo. they used to push pretty hard with ads on TV and when I first needed to use one I would guess I gave yahoo a spin. I remember others like "northern lights", but the most vivid memory I have is when I switched to google. I was on dial up and all I wanted was the damn page to load as fast as possible, and back then and pretty much still google's page didn't have a bunch of links and garbage all over it. it took time to load each stupid thing yahoo had on their homepage, so google was perfect for me. Plus it's results worked were pretty good.

 

[Ranger1st]

.. lol I was on before there were browsers.. I logged on via a local BBS to txt pages.. I played a MOO on mosiac, that was my first actual browser..

 

[Uncle Al]

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.

Awwwww .... don't feel bad. I'm already 60 and my first one was my old Beagle ... he could search out a rabbit double quick!

 

[Guest]

Yahoo

 

[AnonymousSurfer]

Either AOL or Google, I can't remember exactly

 

[cliffordcooley]

It would have to be a rotation between Lycos, AltaVista, Excite, and Yahoo. And then mainly MSN Search when it came out. I don't remember using any of the others.

 

[LNCPapa]

I can't remember - maybe Altavista. My first real ISP was Prodigy and back then I was really kind of fumbling around on the internet. I was on BBS's before this but I don't remember anything about search engines in those days.

 

[BabyFaceLee]

Hotbot

 

[Guest]

I think I used Yahooligans and AskJeeves at first. I learned about them at school. Then my family got dial-up Internet through AOL and I started to use the AOL search engine at home since it was associated with the Internet service.

I remember being annoyed by Google when it first came out because someone (I forget who, but it was probably a teacher) wanted me to use something different than my favorite search engine. I think it may actually have been one of several, one of the others being Lycos, that I experimented with as part of that assignment. Nowadays I use Google as my main search engine and have ever since that early time.

 

[rpjkw11]

Yahoo and, I think, Excite. It's been soooo long ago.

 

[Guest]

Showing age, the first info service used pre-dated the commercial internet: "Dialog" via POTs and a telephone modem. A tad slow, tedious, and very pricey...(-:

 

[gobbybobby]

Used to use Ask Jeeves alot, but dunno if it was my first, it was prob google.

 

[bikingpizza]

I remember using Altavista back in the late nineties. Used Yahoo! A little, but then Google came along...

Astalavista was a pretty good "search engine" too... Or was it an indexer... I can remember...

 

[Guest]

I made my first web page the same month as Yahoo did, October 1994, back when the web browser was Mosaic. I think the first search engines I used were a combination of Excite and Webcrawler. Yahoo initially only indexed. They were superseded by the more effective Infoseek and AltaVista around the mid-nineties, although I remember there were over 20 options back then. By 1999 Google clearly became the best option.
Veronica! been so long I had forgotten the name.

 

[Guest]

Altavista. After what happened to Google and Yahoo, I still miss it.

 

[p51d007]

When we first had internet access, it was all text based. I used the FTP search Gopher to look for stuff.
Good ole 2400, then a whopping 9600 bps!

 

[red1776]

Cripes!..why I'm gonna have to start up the interweb machine and look that up....oh hell, I'm goin to the legion for a brewsky ya know.

 

[Guest]

Yeah! Altavista was the first search engine that I used...

 

[trgz]

I seem to recall Webcrawler and Gopher - accessed via a SPARCstation around 94

 

[Arris]

Altavista and Hotbot(forgot about this one until I read the article) from Uni.

 

[Kibaruk]

Altavista

 

[KernTUG]

Not sure which one was the first, but I used Altavista, yahoo and jubii.dk (danish) until Google arrived.

 

[Laf904]

Altavista.

 

[Bui Khac Tu]

Msn.