Search engines we have known ... before Google crushed them
Remember when the internet was young, moving your bulky monitor was a two-person job and 1.4MB disks didn't look like a typo? Back then (most) people didn't have to choose which web search engine they were going to use: it came prepared by the operating system maker, such as Microsoft and MSN Search, or the folks you got your …
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Why no mention of Northern Light?
"From its founding in 1996 until January 2002, Northern Light operated a Web search engine for public use. During this time period it also developed an enterprise offering of private custom search engines that it built for large corporate clients and marketed under the trade name SinglePoint. In 2002, Northern Light discontinued its public search engine and was acquired by an enterprise software company. In 2003, an employee group bought the company from its parent and it is still employee-owned as of 2010"
Re: Why no mention of Northern Light?
I loved Northern Light, it was waay ahead of all the rest with its semantic groupings. Eg search string 'jersey', results grouped into 'Island', 'Jumper' and 'Potatoes'
Anyone remember 10 years or so back when Northern Light was a public search engine and not a fancy dan research portal thingy?
It had this lovely context-aware refinement system so that a search for Dates would suggest adding filters for fruit, calendars or going out and the like. This narrowed the search results seriously quickly rather than seeing it as an opportunity to serve up more adverts. The only search engine I've ever found to be truly intuitive. I was gutted when they went corporate intranet only.
Northern Light
Was my search engine of choice, mainly because all the others served up near identical crap results.
Excellent little WTF bit.
That last sentence........robot fighting league? Combat-focused bar & grill?
OK, we need more info on this.
Re: Excellent little WTF bit.
That last sentence........robot fighting league? Combat-focused bar & grill?
Ugh, cripes... robot fighting is so goddamn' '90s, man. "Wow, I'm so edgy, I've got a bar'n'grill with a robot fighting pit in 2012..."
Food probably sucks there, too.
There are two reasons why everyone switched to Google
1. clean, simple, uncluttered interface
2. better search results
Re: There are two reasons why everyone switched to Google
I agree on "clean, simple, uncluttered interface". I suppose "better search results" could be true too, but I just wonder how long they are internally strong enough to remain a "clean, simple, uncluttered interface". The force to change things for the "better" and more "modern" is huge within any company.
Re: There are two reasons why everyone switched to Google
Don't forget speed. Google themselves still deem it the most important "feature" of any application.
Speed was partly a corollary of uncluttered interface, I guess. But I remember the very first time I used Google. I understood web protocols, but I felt Google must be using some kind of voodoo to return relevant results in the very instant that I hit Return. Turns out it was mostly down to Ajax and their distributed back-end, which were innovations at the time.
I was fully expecting Yahoo to be on that list......I seem to recall sometime around 1999 that we used to Yahoo! things.
Well, Yahoo haven't had their own search engine for years. Microsoft pay them to use Bing search results. In return, Yahoo pass user stats back to MS to help with targeted advertising.
Yahoo was always a portal/utility
Yahoo never took search too seriously and never insisted on its own engine when something better exists.
Yahoo always cared about mail, news and the (still) excellent "my Yahoo".
Altavista engine mentioned,I also remember them using google for a while. Now they use Bing engine.
Yahoo!
Yahoo! did not start out as an index-based search engine. Initially, it offered something no one else had at the time - a Web index organized by a comprehensive information model and built by human editors. You could search by terms, but you could also simply navigate the hierarchy of the information model.
Search engines we have known ... before Google did it properly
Fixed it for ya....
No love for 37.com? My engine of choice before I was recommended Google in 2000.
It rings a faint bell
...and didn't it have a decidedly NSFW counterpart?
The muckier parts of my brain want to have been 69.com, but that seems a bit too obvious.
Agreed
I actually liked the search as asking questions would get very accurate results compared to Lycos, once they changed and became search only it became the same as everyone else.
Jeeves Shmeeves!
you must be joking. Ask Jeeves was the absolute shittiest search engine ever:
YOU: How do you change the gearbox oil on a Land Rover?
JEEVES: I know where to buy Land Rover
YOU: Give me a recipe for homebrew cider?
JEEVES: I know where to buy recipe
YOU: What is the distance between Earth and Mars?
JEEVES: I know where to buy earth
YOU: How do I tell if I have Bubonic Plague?
JEEVES: I know where to buy Bubonic Plague
...etc...etc...
Re: Jeeves Shmeeves!
This must have been when they were spamming the crapware bars and agreed I missed the period where they were desperatly trying to push you to install adware or buy stuff.
Hotbot
What no HotBot. OMG http://www.hotbot.com still exists!
Re: Hotbot
Dear lord what on earth have they done to Hotbot, checked it last year and stil had the original theme.
Although agreed I am surprised Hotbot isnt in this article even though Lycos brought them out.
Re: Hotbot
Does www.hotboy.com still exist too? NSFW if it does.
Excite
Probably worth pointing out another important alumnus of Excite - Doug Cutting, who went on to write the initial version of Lucene (probably the leading open source search engine), moved to Yahoo, and while there co-wrote the initial version of Hadoop.
Anyone remember archie?
It was a command line client that queried archie servers to find stuff on ftp sites. I don't know if it used a crawler system or the data was entered manually but it worked quite well for the time.
Re: Anyone remember archie?
Yes, that and Gopher, and WAIS and a spiral bound notebook full of IP addresses scrawled in Biro. I remember when all this was fields.. text fields that is.
Re: Anyone remember archie?
One if things pirates abused for mp3/avi. MPAA/ rec. Ass. Of America gave nightmare to admins/owners pressuring them not to include. mp3, a friend of mine said "so they will rename it to. Txt or use wild cards".
Re: Anyone remember archie?
Yep, archie+gopher was sooo useful, before the Web!
What always amazed me at the time was that it was quicker to pull down open source tarballs from Japanese universities than from British sources. And cooler, of course.
Re: Anyone remember archie?
Particularly because the Australian archie server was named a.au and was therefore one of the shortest things you could type if you wanted a test ping to the Internet.... Used it for that way after I stopped using Archie for search...
Re: Anyone remember archie?
There were also the Gopher search engines Veronica and Jughead.
Gopher itself wasn't a search engine - it was a hypertext description and retrieval protocol, more or less analogous to HTTP. It has some associated search mechanisms (eg CCSO directories), but it really shouldn't be on this list.
WAIS was also used as a search engine for Gopher-hosted resources. Veronica only indexed document titles; WAIS could be used for ful-text indexing. WAIS was quite popular with university libraries, at least in my experience.
One nice thing about Archie+FTP, or Veronica+Gopher, is that they're very lightweight and simple protocols that are often trivial to script. I wrote plenty of ad hoc scripts using those protocols back in the day to find and fetch particular resources.
SDK
One of the interesting activities of AltaVista, and giving it more of a Google predecessor feel were its SDK and turnkey local search solutions. I remember building our own XML datastore which the (licended) AltaVista SDK engine and API which could search and provide search results for our local site. There was nothing like it at the time performance wise since one could construct complex but extremely fast queries depending on used DTD. You could also buy AltaVista in a box if memory serves and run your own complex intranet search without programming anything at all.
Re: SDK
No you mention it I think I tried a demo version of the AltaVista local search software.
It looked good but I just didn't have enough data lying around at the time.
hmmm
"or the folks you got your broadband from" - back in those days I was on 33.6k dial-up, son.
Re: hmmm
56k for me, though more often than not you were only get about 48k of that!
Re: hmmm
Nildram used to have some modems in their bank that negotiated your 33kbps modem down to 2400bps. Disconnect - wait a few minutes - and hope someone else had then picked that one up.
Re: hmmm
Bloody luxury. I had a 300 baud acoustic modem. It was two rubber rings and you plugged the headset of a regular Bakelite phone into it.
Re: hmmm
Bloody luxury. I had a 300 baud acoustic modem. It was two rubber rings and you plugged the headset of a regular Bakelite phone into it.
There were thirty-seven of us living in a small shoebox in the middle of the road. Our father used to get us up at three o'clock in the morning and make us lick the road clean with our tongues. Then, he would kill us, and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah.
But, if you tried to tell the youth of today that, they'd never believe you.
Re: hmmm
In a reverse from the normal "mine's bigger than yours," the article brought to mind sending email to a WAIS server for search info over a 2400baud modem circa 1989/90. A few mins later the results would arrive. Hard to think how we used the internet before it became "the web."
Another notable omission
Surprised Northern Light didn't get a mention...
Meh well.
When I were a lad...
...I remember when all we had were gopher, archie and veronica.
haven't you left out
coolwebsearch....always found on computers accessible by teenagers
Ah the good old days gone by...
Signing up for your first ISP, obtaining your first user login ID.
Hearing your dialup modem sing its tune when you connect.
Experimenting with a Geocities personal page.
Netscape Navigator was the de facto, dominant browser.
Signing up for your first webmail account, Rocketmail, then Yahoo Mail and Hotmail.
Using ICQ for instant messaging, watching the flower petals blink.
Games came in floppy diskettes.
Game copy protection was to refer to a game manual and enter some password from a page/paragraph.
16Mb RAM on your computer was something to be envied.
A 2Gb hard disk was awesome.
A screen filter for your CRT monitor to protect your eyes.
Re: Ah the good old days gone by...
2Gb? I remember being told by my lecturers that there was no way I would ever fill my 170mb drive
Re: Ah the good old days gone by...
"A screen filter for your CRT monitor to protect your eyes." - Those bloody awful things that looked like fly-screens you see on doors in films about the US Midwest!
"16Mb RAM on your computer was something to be envied." - As penniless student that would have been the dog's wotnots! 4MB and be very thankful! Ditto 2GB HD, I was over the moon when I got my first 100MB+ HD!
The joy of pushing your video card all the way up to 256 colours at 1024x768 with drivers for Windows 3 you had to spend 30 minutes downloading from a manufacturer's BBS.
Logging into remote university FTP sites as they almost always had decent pirate software available in the public directories! Then catching some nasty virus from said software and spending the day cleaning your machine, LOL!
Messing about with memory manager TSRs to get just a few more KB out of the lower memory ranges to run that hefty DTP package or game.
Simple days and happier times.
Re: Ah the good old days gone by...
"Games came in floppy diskettes."
Is that 8 inch - or the modern 5.25 inch?
"Game copy protection was to refer to a game manual and enter some password from a page/paragraph."
Remember the program installs that wrote onto the floppy? You had to remember to do an uninstall with the floppy before you could install it again.
"16Mb RAM on your computer was something to be envied.
That was an unimaginable RAM size until when - late 1990s? Chips or SIMMs were reckoned in KB increments.
"A 2Gb hard disk was awesome."
A 20mb hard disk was enormous until after about 1990.
I still have trouble doing the mental gear shifts for the correct multiplier on RAM, hard disk, cpu, or network speeds. Is it K, M, G, T?
Re: Ah the good old days gone by...
The first sealed head/disk assembly I saw was 80Mb (and roughly the size of a washing machine). Before that disk platters could be lifted out of disk drives. I've still got the disk, extracted from the plastic cassette, that stored just over one Megabyte. It became obsolete about the time I started working with computers.
Any, er, retreat, on 1Mb disks? (I mean disks, not 180kb floppies! )
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