Do you remember the first time?

I first heard of Google from a bartender (and son of pub’s landlord) in the small town of Birr in Co. Offaly, Ireland in 1999. I have used it ever since.

Nope, can’t remember. I was using metasearchers until they got too clogged with ads and paid results. It wasn’t that Google delivered the best results – I expect that most of what I search for won’t be #1 on the list – but that they didn’t make me wade through shit to get them.

i used yahoo for a year, (’99-2000) then was offline for about six months and everyone was raving about google. i still preferred yahoo, because i had a nice little my yahoo page setup and google seemed to be well, sparse. continuous use of google arose when i started using opera (late 2001) which had google search built in. i am now back to using yahoo as my primary search engine because of the nice little widget they have between the search bar and search results.

Anyone else remember Northern Lights? Lycos? Excite? There was a time when I used each of them pretty much to the exclusion of any others.

I was a committed Dogpile man myself. I still, to this day, feel a little guilty for abandoning the pooch, but I mean…My God! Google does everything! I treat Google like the computer in Star Trek. I type in a question just like Kirk would ask the computer and I get an answer almost as quickly.

So, how could Google be any better? Two words: Voice recognition. Then all we’d need is a holodeck.

I remember first using Google at some point in the late 90’s, after my friend Jim told me about it. Like you I had been using AltaVista, and I seem to remember feeling irrationally territorial about AltaVista, and like it was definitely going to be the best search engine around; so it took me a little while to figure out that Google was better.

(Nice redesign by the way.)

Reads better I think. Needs links to RSS feeds and to previous/next posts.

Embarrassingly, I think I read about it in the NYTimes.

A university librarian showed it to me – it was 1999 – and like Anthony I was particularly directed to the ‘I’m feeling lucky’ bit. On the same day I got my first hotmail account.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. I think I had read about it in Wired.

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

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”.