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For me, it was AltaVista. When Google came out, it was simply mind-blowing how much better it was and I switched immediately.

• lll-o-lll 4y ago
  What I think people tend to forget in this discussion is the genuine value that google brought when it first came out was not “better search” so much as it was “resilience against gaming”. The pre-www search engines (gopher, Archie, jughead) were pretty sophisticated by allowing you to combine search expressions “and, or, near, phrase”, in essentially a regex style fashion, and they were getting better and better. Early www search engines followed the same approach, operating in the way that some library catalog systems still do. The problem is that they were easily gamed by bad actors. This wasn’t an issue for some time, but the very instant making money become a possibility on the internet, everything changed. People remember google trouncing Altavista, but this was the broken Altavista that couldn’t defend against the scammers. The war had been going on for some time by then, with search engines starting well and failing once their weaknesses were discovered and exploited. That google “topic + reddit” is now a thing says to me that the gamers have again won, and a new search approach is needed.