I don't know how old everyone out there is. If you go back far enough to remember anything other than Google, Yahoo, and MSN(live/bing) or not. I am not an old geezer yet, but I do go back far enough to remember life before these big 3. And now that Yahoo is serving up search results powered by Bing we might be referring to them as the big 2 in the near future.
There were a lot more U.S. based search engines that each served up different results. I can't recall a single one of them at the time being superior or better than the other. I think most people at the time just preferred one or the other based on personal preference.
The ones I can remember are:
- Altavista
- Excite
- Lycos
- Yahoo
- InfoSeek
- Netscape
- AOL
- Ask/Ask Jeeves
- HotBot
- MetaCrawler
(Keep in mind they were not affiliated or powered by Google. Each served up their own unique results.)
Excite 1996:
There were a few others I can't think of right off hand or at the moment.
There was much more competition in the earlier days of the internet and through the 1990's.
Kind of funny, and maybe a little sad too. At least to some of us that can remember them and had actually used some of those search engines.
I don't recall MSN search in the earlier days of the internet. I think it came about 1999 or 2000 area. I do recall using Hotmail as long as I can remember though.
