A little aside, I’m shocked to see buildings with an Earthlink sign on them. I’ve seen maybe 4 in 3 different countries!
I had no idea they were still around.
I only recall using Alta Vista to try and find the good pr0n. 
so I assume that you never tried hitler porn 
Yeah, I remember AV being a cleaner solution during a time when everyone else was going all “portal” and cluttering their screens with celebrity news and weather and email services.
This was the same thing that made Google immediately appealing – it was just a search engine. Even now, it’s a search engine with some text links to other services.
My original search engine love though was Infoseek back in early days before it was bought out.
Hell, I don’t even remember Dogpile.
Typically I would use Yahoo for general categories of information, and AltaVista for exact string queries. Basically, what RealityChuck said. I would occasionally use Lycos as well. I hated AskJeeves. And there was one more…I’m blanking on the name, but it had a ship as a logo, IIRC. It would occasionally dig up stuff the other ones and early Google wouldn’t. Like I seem to remember it having some limited newspaper searching capability or something like that. ETA: Ah, I remember now. It was Northern Light.
Archie and Veronica search engines are still out there. Veronica is handy for searching Gopher sites. Veronica is still very active.
Archie isn’t very useful anymore. I haven’t visited a FTP server in a decade.
Have you Gophered lately? I don’t recall using Gopher since about 1995 or so. (But I FTP all the time for business. Even have an FTP client on my phone.)
Once in awhile I Gopher. Theres an add in for Firefox that supports it. But I rarely use it anymore.
I kinda want to check it out and see what’s still around. I’m surprised that Gopher sites are still maintained.
AltaVista had a great advanced search capability, it’s something I want regularly and I don’t know if it exists anymore.
Google is great for getting a page of most common hits, but when you need to get more advanced it pretty much sucks.
Gopher is awesome. I mean technologically as well as nostalgia-wise. It supported hypermedia before there was HTTP and HTML.
I fondly remember nights spent trying to tease useful information out of AOL WebCrawler on 14.4k dialup.
But the first search engine I ever used was the ShareWare Search on CompuServe. I still remember my nine-digit octal user ID number.
Yes. WordPerfect is arguably still a better program than MS Word. And it absolutely was a better program than Word for a long time. Nonetheless, it’s nearly dead. Its market share is, what, something like 3%? And I wonder how many of those buyers are legacies – people who have been upgrading every time a new version comes out.
It’s completely gone from the business market. Law firms, which used to love WordPerfect, have abandoned it. Some government legal departments still use it (I believe the DOJ still runs on WordPerfect), and large law firms will have one copy installed somewhere in their document processing centers just in case, but it’s dead.
They let Microsoft get so far ahead they could never recover. They just fell too far behind in getting their Windows version out, and they never caught up. They never developed a decent applications suite, never (I know there was a suite at one point, and probably still is, but it’s more like a bunch of bundled applications than a truly integrated suite of programs), which is a part of the problem. Microsoft will happily sell you Word, Excel and PowerPoint, and Access, too, and all of the programs can swap data and embed objects in each other (with the exception of Visio). And that’s what the business market wants.
So the lesson is, I guess, that better business practices will trump a better program every time. I don’t know if that will ever apply to Google, or if it did apply to Alta Vista, but the lesson is there.
I’m not sure you understand just how big Google is.
Of course I do. Did you have a point? Or are you implying that Google is so big no one will ever be able to buy it?
Precisely. Google has a market cap of almost $300 billion. They’re one of the biggest companies in the world. Barring some catastrophic stock collapse, they’re the ones doing the buying. Always.
I think the point is that Google could only be bought out by someone significantly larger, and there is no one who’s large enough. If Microsoft could buy out Google, they’d have done it already. Who else is even a contender?
And I, too, remember AltaVista in its glory days. One time, I was searching for a particular piece of software, and got no search results… But did get a targeted ad for exactly the program I was searching for.
Huh, that’s funny, when the page came up after my post, Amateur Barbarian’s post was still unedited, but Justin _Bailey’s post quoting the edited version was there. I guess the updater just checks for new posts, not edits to old ones.
Google never, at any time, caught up with the true boolean search window that Alta Vista once provided as its advanced search. I really miss AV.
“Oh, and remember FaceButt… or ButtBook? Whatever. That thing where people would get all dramatic and talk about themselves? Man, there’s a pre-2020 concept, eh, “talking about yourself”. Whoa, what were we thinking?”
Lycos and Magellan were my big faves back in the day. That was also when Netscape was king. Ah, the 90s. I miss you so. 