2 ms·
>20-25 years ago when there were half a dozen prominent engines That's not how I remember it. My recollection is that for a year or 2 (roughly 1998 and 1999) A
by hollerith 2y ago
>20-25 years ago when there were half a dozen prominent engines
That's not how I remember it. My recollection is that for a year or 2 (roughly 1998 and 1999) Altavista was the dominant engine, which rapidly gave way to Google essentially as soon as Google became available, and since 2000 Google has been the dominant engine.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, I was getting my info on what engines people were using mostly from Usenet, Slashdot and a non-web-based forum called river.org.
- ricardo81 2y agoAlltheweb was fairly prominent then. The likes of Ask Jeeves and Lycos had a few % market share. Gigablast also had its day back then.
- hollerith 2y agoBefore I switched to Altavista, I used Lycos for most of my searches though I did occasionally use Ask Jeeves and Alltheweb just to explore the space of offerings. During those years, I also used DMOZ regularly, which is not a search engine, but rather an index of links organized much like a card catalog in a library is.
- ricardo81 2y agoYahoo bought a lot of the alternatives out, going from memory, then eventually switched to Google results.
- whstl 2y agoAltavista was very popular in tech circles. But I remember "normies" mostly using and talking about Yahoo, Lycos, Ask Jeeves, and even lots of local, country-specific, search engines. And after that moving to Google.
- hollerith 2y agoI noticed at the time that Yahoo's engine was very popular with the less-technical users, yes.
- MagnumOpus 2y agoIn those years from 97 to 99, Altavista might have been your first stop, but you had to ask Excite, Yahoo, Jeeves and Lycos for a full picture or even to get a single good answer. As you say, once Google Beta appeared it was the first and last stop for any of its users.