Pre-Google Search Engines
Commenters reminisce about the inadequacy of early search engines like AltaVista, Yahoo, and Excite compared to Google's revolutionary impact on web search, often debating whether Google was truly innovative or just iterative.
Activity Over Time
Top Contributors
Keywords
Sample Comments
Do you remember how useless search engines were before Google?
Google wasn't the first search engine...
google wasn't the first search engine
You're comparing Google how it was then. Not how it is now
Probably as much as google did for search back in the day.
Google used to be a ~one man search engine clone (and it was definitely better a few years after that than it is today).
Reminds me of the early Google days when everyone was finding ways to search better!
Was this person even around back when Google was first started? I recall routinely using 2-3 search engines just find something trivially easy to find in any modern search engine. The others completely sucked (Excite + Altavista + webcrawler + yahoo was my typical cocktail of search engines, for those wondering).The service is and was simply the BEST and it always WORKED. People don't seem to remember days when the internet was far less reliable (and less useful).
This brings back memories of the time before Google Search.
Altavista was good. I loved Yahoo directory.At that time, google was one big search bar and 10 links.It was fast, had no ads. Until IPO, they didn’t want to do ads.Now it’s just ads on the top links.Google is absolutely vulnerable, if someone comes up with a better search engine.