I was trying to remember what the engine was I used when I first got on the Internet and it got me to thinking about all the different engines there were before Google, Yahoo and MSN swallowed up the search industry. (Oh, and ASK Jeeves with their six % market share.)
So, I put together a list of screenshots below of the following search engines and what their homepages looked like in 1996. They’re linked to the archive.org history of the site for those who may have a few minutes of fun being nostalgic or for those who didn’t make it onto the scene until after search became sophisticated.
(FYI, Hotbot is missing because they’ve blocked archive from accessing their site.)
So, here we go:
AltaVista
DogPile
Excite
InfoSeek
Looksmart (debated this one)
Lycos
Open Text
WebCrawler
Yahoo (I debated this one too)
In the mood for a bit more search engine history? Check out “Where are they now?” by SEW, find some serious in depth search engine historical information here or get a quick glance in chart form here.
If I missed any (and I’m sure I have), please post a link to the archive.org results for the engine, the engine, or a historical write up on the engine. Thanks. ;-) And for those who were online in 1996, what engine were you using back in the day?
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{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Talk about time travelling, I remember when excite was a big player and we were trying to figure out which new player would make it big, also using aol and waiting a minute for each page to load. And that was fast :)
In 1996 I think I had been using HotBot and WebCrawler and switched to AltaVista. How times have changed.
I remember looking for photoshop plugins back in those days… All I can remember is webcrawler. I think I would use lycos later on.
Was Bigfoot a search back then or just for email and people?
I used nothing but AltaVista back when I started. Didn’t know much better.
I used to watch Cnet’s tv show, too (the guy and the girl, what were their names? Always telling us about the latest website, and liked to say “triple-dub†instead of “www.â€
Even back then I disliked IE and used Netscape for everything, except Eudora for e-mail. This was using Windows for Workgroups, of course, since my company was too cheap to ‘upgrade’ to Windows 95.
Hmm, I think it was just a whitepages/yellow pages that included email addresses. I remember I used to use anywho a bit too – but I think bigfoot and (AOL maybe?) stood out in my mind for being like a phone book of email addresses. Actually had two classmates find me via that thing. LOL.
I remember using submit wolf, so I can remember using most engines. I remember a difference between search engines australians were using at the time. AltaVista, Hot Bot and Infoseek, Looksmart, Lycos and most of the others.
There wasn’t much local content around at the time and it was cool ranking against matching geographic names in other locations around the world.