Early search engines and Google

If you are a typical person in the US or elsewhere, you likely have only really used 1 search engine in your adult life, Google. Restated, most people under 40 have only known Google. Yes there is now Microsoft Bing. But in the US estimates are that only some 5% of users have tried it. Bing’s main use seems to be inside Microsoft, to analyse MS Office documents and hotmail, to feed the results into MS’s ad system. Yes, there are the search engines Duck Duck Go, China has Baidu and Russia has a search engine. But the basic story remains Google globally.

After Google rose to dominance, people in Silicon Valley did a post mortem and counted some 14 search engine firms before Google. Here are some: Lycos, Ask Jeeves, Hotbot, Inktomi, Alta Vista and the original one, Yahoo. There are others also…

All but Yahoo are defunct. Which raises a question. Suppose you wanted to try one of them, to see how bad it was. Can you? I don’t think so. Defunct means scrapped. There is the Wayback Machine which archives webpages. But it just stores the HTML of a webpage. It does not and cannot capture the web server that showed the page. So you cannot really re-run Hotbot and send it a query to see how limited the results were compared to Google.

Google was too successful. It killed off the competition. If you never tried the early engines, it’s too late. You have no direct knowledge of them.

They were mostly of 1 ilk. The main method was counting keywords. Suppose a user of a search engine typed “cars”…