"Beer O'Clock" wrote in message
...
On Tue, 29 Sep 2015 16:50:45 +0100, Roland Perry
wrote:

In message
-septem
ber.org, at 15:27:17 on Tue, 29 Sep 2015, Recliner
remarked:

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.

Altavista which was rapidly overtaken by Google.

I, too, was an Altavista user. I remember a not-particularly
computer-literate person using Google as a verb a very long time ago.
It was the first time I realised that Altavista had been overtaken.

The first search engine I remember was Yahoo, which I think was
mentioned in a Demon newsletter. I think the address was
akebono.stanford.edu/yahoo

I was using AltaVista at that time, I switched to Google on the
recommendation of a uni IT officer. This would have been at the start of my
2nd spell at UEA, so Sep-Oct 2000.

James