Google This!

[hasimir]

I've been going a little stir-crazy, which isn't that surprising I guess. I'm going to try to distract myself by encouraging you all to complete another pointless straw poll.

Poll favourite pre-Google search engine

Comments

[onegiantrabbit]

metacrawler

[orcasha]

Excite and Webcrawler.

[tcpip]

www.hotbot.com

[gemsling]

The results don't surprise me. AltaVista started as a simple search box. Then (IIRC) they went to a portal, so many migrated to Google, which was gaining popularity. I notice that AltaVista's back to a simple search box now, and Google's default is still the same basic structure.

Yahoo! users are a different type - they have been used to the portal environment from the start, and are probably still comfortable with it.

[hasimir]

Most of the geeks (not just computer geeks) I knew used AltaVista. They weren't interested in all the extraneous stuff, just finding what they wanted.

It was, of course, another geek who introduced me to Google in the first place. In fact, it was delwyn.

[reddragdiva]

Nope - people migrated to Google because its search failed to suck. Altavista tried to compete with Raging Search (raging.com, which they seem to have now abandoned) which was just a box on the page, but the results were the same, i.e. sorta crap.