Search engines we have known ... before Google crushed them

The Register ^ | 18 December 2012 | Brid-Aine Parnell

[Hammerhead]

HotBot

AskJeeves is nothing more than malware these days.

Same with Ask.com

[PoloSec]

Another search engine and one that I use is Ixquick check it out.

https://ixquick.com/eng/

[jboot]

I used Lycos for a few years, then switched to WebCrawler, then MetaCrawler and finally Google in rapid succession. In the early days a search engine could rock one day and blow the next...everybody was tweaking algorithms, making it up as they went along. It could be fun and it could be frustrating.

I hate Google like a toothache, but it does work well. I know they spy on me. So does the regime, I'm sure. Nothing to be done for it.

The old ('90s) 'net was a blast. Surfing could be like exploring new worlds sometimes, and some of them were hostile. (I had a Norton Ghost image updated daily for those times that the Klingons won.) What we have today is pastuerized, homogenized, STILL not safe and generally not fun.

[conserv8]

https://startpage.com/

[sonofagun]

All right youngin's...don't forget Archie, Veronica and Gopher.

When WWW was text based.

[SuzyQueIN]

I use — and highly recommend — Bing.

Wouldn’t use Google if you paid me to.

[Dr. Sivana]

What the article does NOT mention is all of the people who registered free e-mail accounts in the early years. My wife picked mailcity.com, which now redirects to Lycos. Now she cannot get her mail without looking at a couple of advertising videos. My own, iname.com, was purchased by mail.com (not a search engine), and I finally decided to just buy my own domain and be done with it. Mrs. Sivana doesn’t want to make her friends learn a new e-mail address.

[Capt. Tom]

When I started Magellan was a popular search engine. -tom

[Dr. Sivana]

All right youngin's...don't forget Archie, Veronica and Gopher.

I used Gopher in the very early '90s. The problem is that it was not part of the World-Wide-Web, so it is disqualified from inclusion.

[rdb3]

Ahh... The days of using AltaVista on Netscape Navigator.

[McGruff]

Yahoo was the first but I think they stole the code from I think it was UC Berkley’s search engine.

[zeugma]

What was the one.....Gopher,Groundhog or Prairie dog or something like that?

Gopher was the protocol, with the gopher servers themselves generally referred to as 'gopher sites'.

'Archie' was the first internet search protocol that I'm aware of. You could do an Archie search that would return results from gopherspace.

Archie was superceded by Jughead, and later Veronica searches. By that point gopherspace was being eclipsed by WWW servers. There are still gopher servers out there, but you have to know where to look for them. :-)

[zeugma]

ya beat me to punch. see #32

[GeronL]

we all marvel at the successful people but we always miss those who flamed out.

Whoever decided to buy Lycos for $12.5 billion and later sold for $95 million... did that guy ever make it to CEO?

[GeronL]

seriesly?

kewl!

[GeronL]

I’m sorry for your loss

I missed that. Me too, sounds like a very cool brother.

[CARDINALRULES]

I used that but never won anything until they switched to a game site. I won a few times but just $5 and $10 gift certificates. I redeemed for Amazon and still have money left after about 4 years or so.

-
I use the search toolbar from MyPoints, so I can earn points to cash out for W-M gift cards, Pay Pal or Amazon gift certificates.

[Colonel_Flagg]

The most iconic part of Ask Jeeves was no doubt Jeeves himself, named after the fictional character in P.G. Wodehouse's novels, memorably played on TV by Stephen Fry. The valet posed next to a text box into which natural language questions could be typed and then answered in the form of web results.

“I hadn't the heart to touch my breakfast. I told Jeeves to drink it himself.” ― P.G. Wodehouse

[Amberdawn]

Are there any search engines that don’t give to left wing causes?

[ken in texas]

When WWW was text based.

Yep... back in the days when we scrimped and saved to buy a faster modem for dial-up.