In the not so long ago early days of the Internet, new search engines were a dime a dozen. Very few search engines actually made it through the dot-com boom/crash times to the present day, but that doesn’t mean they don’t deserve their own page in history. In this article, we’ll take a walk down memory lane to see just a few of the Web’s earliest search engines.
Excite
Surprisingly still around today – and looking much like it did in 2005 – Excite.com is one of the Web’s oldest surviving portal/search engine. Talk about throwback; Excite is one of the only Web portals that still offers a downloadable toolbar for easy access, as well as the ability to customize the look and feel of what searches want their Excite to look like.
Started in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google is now the most widely used, popular search engine on the Internet today. From quite austere beginnings to the world’s most used search engines in a short span of time, Google is one of the very few search engines from the early days of the World Wide Web that actually made it through.
FoodieView
FoodieView was a recipe search engine searching over 175,000 recipes from all different kinds of sources, including (but not limited to) the following:
and much, much more. FoodieView is a targeted recipe search engine with a lot of really interesting features; it’s also extremely easy to find good recipes on FoodieView that are actually relevant to what your search query is, which, if you’ve ever tried to find a recipe using certain ingredients on one of the bigger search engines, you’ll agree with me when I say that it can be a huge time-waster. FoodieView just makes the task of searching for recipes easier, and as a busy mom with three kids this couldn’t be more welcome. Note: As of October 2012, Foodieview is no longer in service.
Ask Jeeves
AskJeeves.com, now just Ask.com, has been around in various forms since the late 1990’s. Searchers seemed to be devoted to the butler who would go and gather search engine results based on natural language search technology, a concept that at the time it was introduced was considered absolutely revolutionary.
Yahoo
Yahoo has gone through many, many iterations since it first got going in the early 1990’s, and as of this writing, shows no signs of stopping. From web portal to search engine to peripheral services, Yahoo has kept a large, loyal user base through decades of Web history.
Lycos
Lycos has been around a long time in Internet years; and has evolved from providing its own search results to piggybacking on Ask.com.
AltaVista
AltaVista is a crawler-based search engine, meaning that it sends out software programs called spiders, or crawlers, to search the Web and index websites.
AltaVista has the honor of being one of the oldest search engines on the Web since it started way back (this is a long time in Internet years) in 1995 with the Internet’s first Web index. Just as a quick age comparison, Google started in 1998, and Yahoo started out as an Internet guide in 1994.
Here are some other “firsts” and notable highlights of AltaVista, straight from the About Us page:
- Delivers Internet’s first Web index (1995)
- First multilingual search capabilities on the Internet
- First Internet search engine to launch Image, Audio, and Video search capabilities
- Most advanced Internet search features and capabilities: multimedia search, translation & language recognition, and specialty search
- Awarded 61 search-related patents, more than any other Internet search company
Mahalo
Mahalo is a human powered search directory that uses actual human editors to compile results alongside Google-powered results. This search tool used to be quite active when it first debuted in 2007, but looks to be inactive at the time of this writing.