I went Webcrawler (god, remember Web roulette? That was a blast.), lycos, Alta Vista, AskJeeves, Google (circa 1999), and lately Bing, just cuz.
This, coupled with gopher and Corel being a relevant software player, is quite a nostalgia trip! Thanks guys.
Anyone manage to get Mosaic to work on an Android phone yet? 
AltaVista was the first search engine I used in '93/94. Occasionally you would go to use it and there would be a message saying “We are down while we add an additional GB of RAM to the host”. It was a single node DEC research project. Eventually it became a cluster of Alpha machines, and it was fast - it’s biggest advantage. But it was pure search - no ranking, and the human sorted lists and aggregate sites gained favour. Then Compaq purchased DEC and lost interest - AltaVista was sold to a marketing company called CMDG who tried to monetise it with ads.
In 2001 I moved to the UK. I was offered a job at CMDG. I thought it was cool to be working for the company that ran AltaVista, even though I no longer used it. But on my first day I was shown the server room and a stack of laptops that used to belong to the sales staff they had recently laid off - when I got an offer with EDS the next day, I took that and didn’t look back.
Sad to hear AV is gone, but it lost the market a long time ago.
And it was CMGI - who do still exist. I didn’t even know that Yahoo now owned them.
EarthLink is most certainly still around. My paycheck says so!! Not sure what countries you’re referring to, but we are a domestic company. The only thing I can imagine is maybe an offshore call center?
Anyway, EarthLink. Yes still around, but figured out long ago being an ISP did not have a future in it. We do do still have a few ISP customers, amazingly, but the company has transitioned into being an IT Services, IP Voice, and Data network provider to the SMB market. Cloud services, MPLS network, hosted voice systems, etc.
Thing I liked most about AltaVista was that I could slap quotation marks around a search string and it would treat it as an exact phrase search. Most other search engines would respond with something like “Hey, we noticed you enclosed your search string in quotation marks. As a special extra service, we’re ignoring them and giving you what we think you wanted!”
Then AV affiliated with Yahoo! and that feature went away.
Now I mostly use Bing because I just can’t bring myself to join the Googlemind.
Wow, this is a trip down memory lane 
You guys inspired me - I went looking for my old spreadsheet that I used to keep and update with all search engine info for doing our website at my workplace. Found it too!
Here’s a screen grab of it just for the fun of it - thought you guys would enjoy:
Search Engines
Not so amazingly. Some very unlucky folks are still stuck with dialup. And then there are the ones like me - I keep my Earthlink account for the webmail service. I like it better than the web-based email my “real” ISP offers, and Earthlink has been my primary email account since 1998. And I’m happy to keep paying my monthly subscription cost to keep it that way! 
I had no idea it was this popular. I remember it existing, but I never used it for much. The web wasn’t as appealing on a Unix shell, and when I did use it, I either used Yahoo! or URLs from books people gave me. I had more fun with Telnet and Gopher. And I was on a bunch of mailing lists using Pine.
All due respect, Justin, but as always your vision extends about to next Sunday.
Google will someday be an entity ready to be acquired, or if not that, reshaped under a new and less-scrupled board - and whoever acquires or takes it over will have instant access to the uncountable terabytes of data and processing power, and will likely have the “Don’t Be Evil” plaque quietly consigned to a back room.
My entire point is that there are people who are content with Google doing all it does specifically because they’re being so “nice” about it. Only an idiot could think that would last, and unlike most tech companies that fold, Google’s intellectual property will only increase in value. It’s not some marginal edge in CPU or search or graphics tech that will be quaintly obsolete in a few years; it’s immeasurably vast databases of marketing and online behavior information with a lifespan of many decades, or more.
Great link.
It’s already happened. Anyone remember Visicalc? It’s the single piece of software responsible for our having desktop computers today. Or how about Wordstar, which ruled the word processor world back in the early 80s?
Man, that makes me feel old. I’ve used both those programs and thought they were the absolute cat’s ass at the time.
Google is the third-biggest company in America right now, by market cap. That kind of reach doesn’t just disappear overnight. And that kind of entrenched groupmind doesn’t change due to a board of directors switch. It infects the whole company and it’s affecting the way other big businesses work:
“Don’t Be Evil” may ultimately be just a plaque, but it will take a long time to get there. And maybe, just maybe, Google’s motto will survive long after the creators have moved on.
I’m not sure whether to admire your trust or sigh over your inexperience. A little of both is in order, perhaps. You clearly have no historical sense of how fast things can go bad for even the biggest companies when the game changes or shit happens.
Just within the modern computer spectrum, go look up WordPerfect, Lotus, Borland, dBASE IV, Cyrix… oh, and Eagle Computers while you’re at it. Most of these were world-dominating titans with an unbreakable lock on their market segment or even a good sweep of the computing industry. All are gone or minor husks of themselves. Google maybe larger - right now - and more diversified, but trust me - I’ve been watching this industry for 30+ years - shit happens, and the one constant is that no one, especially not in the rosewood-paneled boardrooms, saw it coming.
It’s still around, at least in name.
I still have an earthlink email account … 
Here’s where you’re not getting it. Google has no “market segment.” They have their fingers in everything. When you’ve got the best search engine, the best webmail client, the best maps site, the best video player, the best cloud text editor, the best image searcher, the best news portal, and the most popular mobile platform, you can afford to take a few fliers… like self-driven cars and, a social network.
“Don’t Be Evil” has been just a plaque for quite some time now. Google does plenty of evil stuff these days, and that slogan (and the memory of the early days when it meant something) has just made it easier for them to get away with it. I think they meant it originally, but past a certain size (that Google is now very far past) and the structural need of a corporation to maximize profits far outweighs any goodwill even the most powerful of the people involved may feel.
Fixed that for ya. 
From 7th largest company to bankrupt in 10 months. Not necessarily overnight, but damned quick.
Apple. And that’s pretty much it. Extremely unlikely, of course, and Apple’s market cap is on the decline (though still enormous…385B). But the reason they are one that actually probably COULD do it? They have 145 Billion dollars cash on hand. Right now. So, they could buy half of Google right now without even doing any sort of lending or other acquisition processes.
I very much doubt that Google is cooking the books.