When did you first Google?

In My Humble Opinion
21
  1. 98ish? I think.
  2. Ask Jeeves (MrDantastic, I had to check… Wow, Jeeves did retire. When and why?)
  3. Google, pretty much… Though more and more for lots of questions I have Wikipedia has been more helpful.
22

Well, wikipedia helped me out somewhat with that question… link.

But most of the information they provided is fictional to give Jeeves a personality or whatever.

23

I think I started using Google in 2001 or so, maybe a year or two earlier. I found out about it from reading this message board.

I used to have a bunch of different search engines, probably about 4 or 5. Yahoo was probably my primary option. When I first started using Google I just added it to the list, but it quickly replaced and eliminiated the others for me.

I now use Google extremely close to 100% of the time.

24
  1. Late 1999 or early 2000
  2. Dogpile, and before that Yahoo
  3. Pretty much 100% Google.
25
  1. Probably late 2000 or early 2001. I’d tried it a few times before joining the straight dope, but hadn’t liked it. Dopers converted me by the end of 2001, though.
  2. Yahoo.
  3. Yup.
26

  1. Sometime in 2001. I found the Straight Dope site via Yahoo, I recall, and that was late 2000. Up to early 2001, I used Yahoo as my main search engine (a bit of Alta Vista as well).

  2. Yahoo, Alta Vista, occasional dalliance with Ask Jeeves and Dogpile

  3. Google is now my main search engine. If not 100% of the time, pretty darn close to it.

27
  1. Around 2000
  2. Infoseek & AltaVista
  3. Damn near 100%

Like some of the others here, I was immediately attracted by the clean, minimist layout of Google. Infoseek used to be something like that before they changed it to a “portal” style site (and later merged it with Yahoo).

28
  1. I don’t remember. I do know that as soon as I started on it, every other search engine went off my list.
  2. Yahoo, Altavista… I don’t remember the name, but there was one that had a spider with her web as its logo, before IExplorer…
  3. 100% Google.
29

I started Googling several years ago at work, before I had a computer at home, mostly to find which of my students had plagiarized essays from websites.
I Google nearly every day now for all sorts of things.

30

Late 2000 or early 2001. My boss told me about Google, but being a Licensed Physics Nerd[sup]TM[/sup], I used the URL “gogol”, like the mathemtician. Luckily, the owner of gogol.com at the time had a sense of humor about it, and had a form on his home page where one could do Google searches. Took me days to realize I was in the wrong place! :smack:

In early 2001 I was trying to put together a check-off chart to use as a positive feedback mechanism for toilet-training. I wanted to add a picture of a toilet to the chart. I can’t draw, so I thought I might find something on the web. I was very afraid of what I might see when I started a google search for “toilet picture” :eek:, but Google gave me exactly what I wanted as the first item!

AFAIR, Metacrawler.

Yes! Not only for web searches, but for finding the correct web site if there is any possible ambiguity in the name. I think the last time I hit straightdop.com my browser spawned a zillion pop-ups and I had to reboot my computer.

31

I can tell you the exact day that I used google for the first time…February 12, 2001. It was the day that Google announced that they were buying out deja.com. I was furious, because I was deeply in love with deja and the usenet search it provided. I was convinced this company I had never heard of would screw it up. After testing the “crappy bastard site”, I swore off google, and wrote them an angry email stating that I would never use their site again. (I was impressed, though, when I received an email response from an ACTUAL HUMAN at google.)

At the time, I think I mostly used yahoo, and dogpile when yahoo didn’t give me the answers I needed.

Needless to say, I use google 99.9% of the time now…the 0.1% being attributed to accidental MSN searches on IE.

32
  1. Around its very begining
  2. Yahoo/ Altavista/ Ask Jeeves
  3. Nope. Still using Yahoo almost exclusively. Love those guys :smiley:
33

1. When did you first use the Google search engine?

Not sure exactly, but it was just very early on, when it was a New Thing that no-one I knew had heard of. A small article in the Guardian put me onto it.

2. What search engine did you use before Google?

A combination, as set up in Copernic.

3. Do you use Google exclusively now?
Pretty much, yes. Occasionally I’ll still fire up Copernic, but it’s rare to have to do that these days.

34

  1. Probably early 2000. Certainly I used it a lot in my previous job, which I left in October 2000.

  2. Dogpile.

  3. Yep.