You mean there was life before Google? It’s easy to forget what the search landscape was like before the dot com bubble burst. Lots of players in the space all suffering from the same issues. Search results that weren’t relevant, easy to game, and often plagued with porn sites for searches of every kind. Huge investment was made in these companies, lots of which went to expensive television ad campaigns (some even during the Super Bowl), foosball tables, and many other useless pursuits that did nothing to help them establish viable business plans with long term strategies.
Anyway, here are a few sources to help you take a trip down memory lane:
- SEO Since 1999 - overview of how search has changed in the past 10 years
- The Searching Graveyard - nice collection and overview of some of the original search engines that no longer exist
- Wayback Machine - you can use this tool to see what the homepage of Yahoo and others looked like back in the day ( rel=”nofollow”Yahoo homepage in October of 1996)
- SearchEngineHistory.com - cool site from the infamous Aaron Wall
- Wikipedia Entry for Search Engines - covers history, technology, etc.
Oh, and this is a great collection of some of the commercials search engines were running back in 1998
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