What did you use before Google?

[peter_w]

A rather uninteresting blog post happened to mention the likes of Alta Vista and Lycos, which made me think back to pre-Google and what engine I used to use when first starting out.

It was www.webcrawler.com for me, which seems to have survived and indeed evolved.

What was the first search engine you used? Or indeed the first engine you targetted for "SEO" (not that I called it that back then)?

 

[Edwin]

Veronica, and Jughead back in the Gopher days. Altavista and Hotbot more "recently"...

 

[bedazzledaz]

I used to love excite.co.uk

 

[seanc]

dogpile

and alta vista

 

[mibut]

Northern Lights

 

[anthony]

Northern Lights

Northern Light was a great site, it seemed to go deeper and unearth more information than all the others put together. What ruined it for them though was their payment model, and although they still exist today, they could have been a much bigger outfit!

 

[Ashton]

I used excite, then altavista, then google.

 

[mibut]

Northern Light was a great site, it seemed to go deeper and unearth more information than all the others put together. What ruined it for them though was their payment model, and although they still exist today, they could have been a much bigger outfit!

Yes, definately was one of the best especially for deep search and research.

 

[JMOT]

the phone book lol

 

[redbird]

altavista.digital.com --> altavista.com

 

[monaghan]

Veronica, and Jughead back in the Gopher days. Altavista and Hotbot more "recently"...

Gopher, that brings back memories

Web wise, then mostly Altavista, but generally you tended to know what you wanted so didn't need a search engine in the early days

 

[disruptive]

I hate to pop to the local newsagents for a copy of Razzle.

 

[cm1975]

Yahoo and occassionally Altavista/Lycos etc.

Switch over to Google, because everyone else had, not necessarily because it gave better result. We are all sheep!

 

[Blossom]

AOL (!)

Using Google now obviously, but think Blekko could do pretty well.

 

[crabfoot]

I had a gopher called Badger that a mate of mine wrote. Every program he wrote had to be called after something that lived in the ground, because his company bought all their gear from Burroughs!

I also used Northern Light - I came to it via a personal metasearch called Bullsye, which ran six engines at once. After Northern Light closed the doors, Bullseye was not hitting as well as before - sometimes Google came close, more often HotBot or AltaVista.

Today, I get the best answers from DuckDuckGo, Blekko and Yandex. DuckDuckGo and Blekko have recently agreed to trade some tech, so they are getting mutually better. It's been obvious for a while that the big 3 need some competition, and here they come ...

Might mention that NLsearch is freely available from Northern Light, has been for a couple of years, but it is restricted to news items only, not a general search engine.

 

[wb]

Only used to be Alta Vista for me a long time ago, switched to Google quite early on though.

 

[expertc]

Veronica, and Jughead back in the Gopher days. Altavista and Hotbot more "recently"...

Gopher and Veronica ... thanks for reminding AltaVista was my main search engine for long time. And Compuserve's own search. Yes, my first website was up on ourworld.compuserve.com in mid-90s and was taken down only this June

 

[Edwin]

BTW, if we're talking about nifty current search engines, I'm always quite partial to http://www.ixquick.com/ - it's a very uncluttered meta-search engine.

 

[Pred]

I hate to pop to the local newsagents for a copy of Razzle.

ah, Razzle, that brings back memories
there was always one being pulled out of someones sportsbag in the bag of a physics lesson
had to have something to get through it

 

[arenee]

wow my first thought was ... wasn't google always around. but it wasn't. i got my first 'portable' computer in 1985 (35 lb compaq) and it was alta vista i believe. look at how dominating google has become. don't care what bing is trying to do, i'm a google girl