Comments on: Do you remember the first time?

By: Jacob Christensen

Jacob Christensen — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 08:56:00 +0000

Not the slightest idea. But I do remember being introduced to Yahoo! in 1996. And that back then Yahoo had a Cool Site of the Day feature.

I think I used Yahoo’s web catalogue quite a bit up until 1999-2000 and at some point word-based search took over.

By: Cryptic Ned

Cryptic Ned — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 05:02:37 +0000

But it was around early 2002. Not my first experience with it, but the first time I realized that AltaVista was in effect completely useless for a lot of purposes, was when I was looking for an online dictionary between two languages, and was unable to make AltaVista comprehend what I wanted, whereas in Google I didn’t even need to use “NOT”.

By: Cryptic Ned

Cryptic Ned — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 05:00:30 +0000

I do remember, not the date, but the feeling of a real eureka – the web all of a sudden unbroke. Relevant results that had been frustratingly buried on page 17 of an Alta Vista search were all of a sudden just there.

Same exact thing with me. And I’m returned to those Alta Vista days whenever I accidentally type a query into the MSN search bar in Internet Explorer instead of the Google search bar in Firefox.
“What’s this? The first twenty results are all ads, at the same domain, for the same thing, which is related to only one of the three terms I searched for?”

I distinctly remember the four eras of search. First Webcrawler, then Lycos, then AltaVista, which was a VAST improvement…and then Google.

By: nick s

nick s — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 03:31:03 +0000

Transition between late 1997 and early 1998, when it was google.stanford.edu. Altavista and NorthernLights were barely navigable.

By: Nell

Nell — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 00:28:06 +0000

I think it was late 1997 or early 1998, from a mention on Dave Winer’s blog. I’d been using AltaVista, and I never went back.

By: John I

John I — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 00:00:28 +0000

By: mollymooly

mollymooly — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 16:42:54 +0000

I made a rare visit to Google’s front page to see whether “I’m feeling lucky” is still there. Has anyone ever used this?

By: Aidan Kehoe

Aidan Kehoe — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 15:38:58 +0000

I first used it in second year of college, on the recommendation of a Wired-reading, conscientiously geeky friend, which would have been in 1999. I have a vague memory of using Northern Lights before it, but I gave up on that in the next few months, and I was also surprised at the unexpected change from Google being a geek favourite to something universal—even at that point, my impression was that real geek favourites couldn’t manage universal appeal.

By: NickS

NickS — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 03:14:07 +0000

I’m surprised to realize that I started using google before most of the people here.

I started using it in 96 or 97 based on a recommendation in the Steve Jackson Games Daily Illuminator column. Prior to that my favorite was metacrawler. I never liked or used Yahoo much, and I stuck with google after that.

It was a little odd for me to see it go from being a quirky geeky thing to one of the most recognizable brands of the era.

By: leo

leo — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 02:10:18 +0000

Siva is a one-man anti-google fanatic. I wouldn’t write anything on his site.

Not that I’m in love with Google but there are a whole lot worse threats to humanity than it.

Google made it possible to find things without the cruff and fluff of Altavista and other competitor search engines. What killed Altavista (at the time the leading search engine) was the inclusion of paid links in the search results. That ended it for me.

By: Scott Stiefel

Scott Stiefel — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 01:21:22 +0000

No. When something’s a real habit, I generally forget how I started.

By: Bruce Baugh

Bruce Baugh — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 21:20:05 +0000

I was using Hotbot primarily, with Altavista and Ask Jeeves as backup. I can’t remember when I first heard about Google, but I remember that it was several months after that before I actually tried it out, for reasons I can’t now recall. For several months it was one tool among equals, but gradually got more and more of my attention for the usual reasons.

By: Righteous Bubba

Righteous Bubba — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 15:53:07 +0000

transitioned from excite

What I remember about Excite is Robert Cringely’s Geeks show on PBS. He was talking with the founders in the garage where Excite started and it was the height of the internet bubble when each of these kids was worth some outrageous amount of money like $100 000 000 dollars.

By: Slocum

Slocum — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 15:24:51 +0000

I, too, transitioned from excite and altavista to google and can’t remember exactly when. Interestingly now, I don’t necessarily find Google’s search to be superior to the alternatives—Ask.com’s page previews are quite nice, for example. But I guess I use Google most of the time out of force of habit.

By: vivian

vivian — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 02:15:07 +0000

Yep, Alta-Vista had made it’s main page a lot more cluttered, closer to a portal, so I was ready for a new engine, but figured the next one would get all cluttered in about six more months. Google was and remains clean (unless you customize it) what, ten, eleven years later? the I’m Feeling Lucky button was an amusing gimmick, but what turned me from a user to a fan was the ability to have my searches returned translated into Swedish-Chef-ese (bork bork bork).

Now that you mention it, Near was a really nice feature, I do miss it.