A Look Back At The Old Search Engines

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?

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He 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.