Dinosaur Sightings: Old Search Engines

By John Sheesley July 28, 2008, 6:05 AM PDT

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The new kid on the block for search engines is Cuil. Search engines have been around as long as the Internet however. Here’s a look back at some of the first homepages of search engines that are still around today, and some that have passed on.

The images you see on the following pages come from The Wayback Machine.

Here’s the homepage of Cuil, the newest search engine which claims to have the largest Web index on the planet.

AltaVista was the Google of the late 90’s. It was one of the most popular search engines of its time. Still in existence, AltaVista is now owned by Yahoo and is powered by Yahoo Search.

This screen shot is from October 1996.

Before Ask.com, there was AskJeeves. AskJeeves was special because it allowed searches to be phrased in the form of a question, rather than entering keywords like most search engines.

AskJeeves fired Jeeves and is now simply Ask.com.

This screen shot comes from April 1997.

Dogpile is a meta-search engine which draws on other search engines for results. Here’s an early version from June, 1997.

Excite was an early competitor to Yahoo. It tried to be the next Yahoo by becoming an ISP and Portal as well as a search engine. Excite merged with @Home and subsequently cratered. It was ultimately acquired by Ask.com.

This is Excite’s home page from October 1996.

Here’s one of the early homepages of a little search engine company called Google. It’s from December 1998.

Lycos was an early popular search engine like AltaVista. It has gone through several owners and iterations as well, but still remains a popular search engine.

This page is from October 1996.

Before Live.com was MSN Search. Search was always more of a sidelight for MSN, not a central feature. Microsoft has since focused more on search, but still isn’t nearly as popular as Google.

This screen comes from December 1998.

CNET Networks, now CBS Interactive, purchased the Search.com domain very early. Search.com is a meta-search engine like Dogpile.

This page is from October 1996.

WebCrawler was an early metasearch engine. It has gone through several owners and now belongs to InfoSpace.

This screen is from October 1996.

Although Yahoo has always been a portal of sorts, one of it’s earliest successes was in the realm of search. It was an early king of search, overthrowing others such as AltaVista.

This screen comes from October 1996.

By John Sheesley

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