A Look Back At The Old Search Engines

Sep 14, 2009 at 9:31am ET by Barry Schwartz

The Six Revisions blog complied an excellent list of the classic search engines, some dating back to the 1990s. His list includes screen shots of both the old and current (if available) versions of HotBot, Excite, WebCrawler, Ask Jeeves, Ask.com, Yahoo, Google, Dogpile, AltaVista, Lycos, MSN Search, Bing, AOL Search, Infoseek, Go.com, Netscape, MetaCrawler, and All The Web.

Scrolling down the list and looking at some of those old screen shots bring back fun memories. Of course, there are many search engines missing, too many to list there or even here. But looking at the old screen captures of Google, Ask Jeeves and AltaVista reminds me of the simpler days in search.

Which was your favorite old search engine?

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.

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2 COMMENTS ON A Look Back At The Old Search Engines

seladmin, September 14th, 2009 at 2:13 pm ET:

thanks for taking us back in time!

Helen, September 26th, 2009 at 6:43 pm ET:
Premium member since 05/2009

Very cool! :)

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