# When did google become the be-all, end-all of search engines? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [September 17, 2009, 4:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-google-become-the-be-all-end-all-of-search-engines/510410 "2009-09-17T04:36:03Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 9\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![AHunter3](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ahunter3/32/368_2.png) [@AHunter3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AHunter3)\ **Post date:** [September 18, 2009, 1:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-google-become-the-be-all-end-all-of-search-engines/510410/21 "2009-09-18T13:39:14Z")
I was one of the last people I know to quit using Alta Vista preferentially over Google. They had a boolean Advanced Search which I really miss. But they did something at some unknown point which screwed up their own search engine’s behavior. Their boolean search stopped working. AlltheWeb has one and I occasionally go there but they don’t seem to have the indexing depth, so like everyone else I mostly use Google now. I hate their interface though. Why can’t they do an Advanced Search that doesn’t treat us all like we’re congenital idiots? Why can’t we have a boolean box to type our own search equations, with parentheses and the whole works? ---
**Author:** ![ultrafilter](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/3d9bf3/32.png) [@ultrafilter](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ultrafilter)\ **Post date:** [September 18, 2009, 1:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-google-become-the-be-all-end-all-of-search-engines/510410/22 "2009-09-18T13:56:51Z")
Google was founded in September 1998, so those of you who discovered it in 1999/2000 weren’t all that late to the party. ---
**Author:** ![FlyingRamenMonster](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/ce7236/32.png) [@FlyingRamenMonster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FlyingRamenMonster)\ **Post date:** [September 18, 2009, 3:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-google-become-the-be-all-end-all-of-search-engines/510410/23 "2009-09-18T15:22:51Z")
I used MSN search and later Dogpile up to around 1999 or 2000, when I read a rundown of search engines in the paper that mentioned an up-and-rising engine I’d never heard of that apparently didn’t sell results to the highest bidder (I had no idea that went on!). Within a year, I’d completely switched to Google. All the good Dogpile results were from Google anyway. ---
**Author:** ![gotpasswords](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/c57346/32.png) [@gotpasswords](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gotpasswords)\ **Post date:** [September 18, 2009, 3:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-google-become-the-be-all-end-all-of-search-engines/510410/24 "2009-09-18T15:25:33Z")
Who else here remembers getting an email from Steve Gibson somewhere back in 1997 or 1998 about these two college kids who created a search program as a senior project or whatever, and that it was really slick and you really should give it a try? It was probably the first and last piece of spam that I paid attention to. 😃 ---
**Author:** ![Translucent\_Daydream](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/translucent_daydream/32/16170_2.png) [@Translucent\_Daydream](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Translucent_Daydream)\ **Post date:** [September 18, 2009, 5:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-google-become-the-be-all-end-all-of-search-engines/510410/25 "2009-09-18T17:13:17Z")
Two words: Dial Up. That suck fest loved google because it didn’t load up ads and stuff like that when you hit the page. That why I started using it. ---
**Author:** ![Hari\_Seldon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hari_seldon/32/5173_2.png) [@Hari\_Seldon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hari_Seldon)\ **Post date:** [September 19, 2009, 12:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-google-become-the-be-all-end-all-of-search-engines/510410/26 "2009-09-19T00:29:01Z")
> [@gotpasswords](#): > > Who else here remembers getting an email from Steve Gibson somewhere back in 1997 or 1998 about these two college kids who created a search program as a senior project or whatever, and that it was really slick and you really should give it a try? > > It was probably the first and last piece of spam that I paid attention to. 😃 They weren’t college kids. They were grad students in CS and it was a business, not a project. From the beginning Sergey was obviously going to go commercial with it. ---
**Author:** ![Tamex](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/ccd318/32.png) [@Tamex](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tamex)\ **Post date:** [September 19, 2009, 4:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-google-become-the-be-all-end-all-of-search-engines/510410/27 "2009-09-19T04:43:42Z")
> [@Translucent\_Daydream](#): > > Two words: > > Dial Up. That suck fest loved google because it didn’t load up ads and stuff like that when you hit the page. That why I started using it. Me too. You used to wait forever to get results from the other search engines. Google was fast. First time I used it, I was a convert. ---
**Author:** ![Sage\_Rat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sage_rat/32/399_2.png) [@Sage\_Rat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sage_Rat)\ **Post date:** [September 19, 2009, 5:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-google-become-the-be-all-end-all-of-search-engines/510410/28 "2009-09-19T05:31:50Z")
> [@fluiddruid](#): > > Yes, they just searched using multiple search engines. Before Google, it was necessary to search all of the popular search engines to find relevant content for many searches; I remember being in college during this time, and going though Yahoo, Webcrawler, Alta Vista, Lycos, etc. just to find relevant pages. I could always find what I wanted with AltaVista, and way easier than with Google. but you had to use AND/OR and so on. If you were good at AltaVista’s searching rules, you could find what you were looking for very accurately, but I think most people weren’t terribly good at it. ---
**Author:** ![ripopgome](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/a698b9/32.png) [@ripopgome](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ripopgome)\ **Post date:** [September 20, 2009, 4:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-google-become-the-be-all-end-all-of-search-engines/510410/29 "2009-09-20T16:52:24Z")
> [@Tamex](#): > > Me too. You used to wait forever to get results from the other search engines. Google was fast. First time I used it, I was a convert. This is probably the prevailing reason Google ‘won’. Sure, accurate search results are great (and important), but they’ve shared research that basically says “the faster we made it, the more people used it”. Even if you get slightly worse results, but can do 2 or 3 refined searches in the time it takes to do 1 at a competitor, people are happier. Yes, I’m vastly oversimplifying the entire picture; but as I’ve seen on Google tshirts at conferences, “fast is my favorite feature”. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-google-become-the-be-all-end-all-of-search-engines/510410.md?page=1)