General Knowledge

[balances]

Alta went online in late 1995.
They also have foriegn divisions:

* Oct 99 launched altavista.se, Swedish site
* December 1999 altavista.co.uk, UK site
* February 2000 altavista.fr, French site
* March 2000 altavista.nl, Dutch site
* April 2000 altavista.it, Italian site
* July 2000 altavista.in, India site

Excite Went online in Dec 1995

Hotbot Went online in May 1996

WebCrawler went online way back in the spring, 1994

Inktomi was founded in 1996

infoseek Went online in August 1995 as a directory service.

Google has been online since late 1997

Lycos went online in June 1994.

Fast went online in mid 1998.

Northern Light went online in the fall of 1997.

LookSmart went online in Oct. 1996.

Yahoo Went live online in August of 1994 :D

[Dirkjan]

urrr.... msn search? overture (goto.com)?

[balances]

I dont have idea of msn and overture

[compar]

I would have thought that Northern Light was earlier than that.

[dave487]

Interesting that there are no new major SE's since 1999, will there ever be room for any more???

[TechEvangelist]

None of the newer SE's have made it to the major leagues due to the incredible size of the competition. Newcomers have a pretty steep hill to climb and today it requires major ching-ching to get you there.

[compar]

Newcomers have a pretty steep hill to climb and today it requires major ching-ching to get you there.
Yes, and besides that, it takes a lot of money :D

[Geir]

I knew altavista also had a Norwegian divison (http://no.altavista.com/), so I checked it out, and found the following altavista divisions in addition to those already mentioned:
03/99 Altavista Germany
09/00 Altavista Denmark
10/00 Altavista Australia, Ireland, Spain
11/00 Altavista Norway, Austria, Switzerland
12/00 Altavista Brazil, Portugal
01/01 Altavista Belgium
03/01 Altavista New Zealand

:) Geir