5 Search Engines You Left In The Past (But You Loved Them!)
When was the last time you searched for something on the Internet? I bet you googled something just before you’ve got to this article, right? Google was so different and new back when it started. Its search engine got better with every search and it quickly became the “ruler” of the web – at least in terms of the search market.
The competitors were pretty much lost back then. When Google’s homepage was pure white with a logo and a search bar, others had news links, advertisements and every other distraction you can think of. Google ruled so much that even the verb “to google” got into the dictionary. Let’s take a short history trip to see what we used to search for stuff in pre-Google era.
Yahoo!
Ah, Yahoo!, the fallen giant. Back when Google was just a startup, Yahoo! ruled the search engine land. Afterward, it competed with Google for a while, creating a lot of additional services but it was worthless. Today, Yahoo! is just a search engine/news site trying to keep users with a whole bunch of sub-sites, with Flickr being probably the most popular one.
AltaVista
AltaVista was also one of the biggest search engines in the good old days. Today it’s owned by Yahoo! who discontinued its development. AltaVista was the first searchable database of a large part of the World Wide Web and one of the features it had was Babel Fish, a free translation service which is now rebranded as a part of Yahoo!
Trivia Point
Back in the days, the Web wasn’t too big. Every search engine had its crawlers, automated scripts which indexed the web and the one who had better crawlers had better search results. However, if you wanted your site to appear in the search results before the crawler gets to you, you had to submit it to different search engines!
Can you imagine that? Submitting every single blogpost or even every tweet to Google to be indexed? Silly 🙂
Ask Jeeves
Ask Jeeves, today known simply as Ask.com, was the first search engine in which you could ask questions in a natural language. Of course, classic keyword search was also possible. You could say that Ask Jeeves was Siri’s predecessor in some way. However, today Ask is a search engine which combines answers from real people over the Web.
Lycos
Lycos began as a university research project on Carnegie Mellon University, which by the way, registered one of the first domain names ever. It was a fine search engine as well, however, today is just another “trendy” site focused not so much on the search, but on more social and media aspects of the site.
MSN
Oh, the MSN! I’m not sure about you, but the Internet community back then was divided into two groups – ones that searched the Web on Yahoo! and the other used MSN search. Of course, because MSN was much more social back then, you could have email accounts there and for chatting with friends you’ve used MSN Messenger. A complete solution under one name. Today, Microsoft has some trouble naming its products, so you could have witnessed MSN being renamed to Live, MSN Live, Windows Live and whatnot.
The Web was really different back then, wouldn’t you agree? Have you ever used these search engines?
