Roland Perry wrote:
In message -septem
ber.org, at 13:48:15 on Tue, 29 Sep 2015, Recliner remarked:
And in those 16 years nobody bothered to Google, (or possibly Netscape it
back then)! According to Wikipedia, the film was shot at Aldwych and Holborn.

Did Netscape ever have a search engine? I don't recall one.

I think back then Yahoo, Excite, Ask (Jeeves) or MSN would have been the
most likely candidates. In those early days, I used a search aggravation
engine

Perhaps it was very aggravating, but I expect they intended to be aggregating.

Drat! The perils of an iPad that thinks it knows what you meant better
than you...


that farmed out queries to multiple engines and combined the
results, as no single engine had comprehensive coverage of the then tiny
Web. Google was just getting started but didn't stand out back then.

Yahoo was more of a collection of human-researched links and didn't have
a search engine until 2002, MSN only started search in 1998, didn't
really settle down until 2005, and in 2009 was rebranded Bing. Ask Jeeves
wasn't until 1997 (about the same date as Google).

Before Google, people used AltaVista (1994, which evolved to a
Usenet-only search) and Lycos (1994 again).

What would people have been using in 1999-2000? I have no recollection of
which engine I was using back then, apart from the parallel aggregate
search engine whose name also escapes me.