yahoo dominated and used the directory system in alphabetical order via manual additions to categories. webmasters started naming their sites starting with the letter A such as "absolute..." i personally used numbers naming my site 100% (subject) and rose right on top of the titles using letters. pretty silly way of categorization and i'm glad google found a better way.
From what I remember being younger was Yahoo. And that was because everyone had their email there plus the Chat. It was the place that you did everything. I don't think that there was so much emphisis put on Search as there is today though. Remember before Google the Internet was still in its infancy. With Google the internet hit puberty. Who know's what or who is going to bring it into adult hood.
Google didn't even dominate right after it was formed, at least not for awhile Altavista was big and Yahoo too
Not sure if this answers your questions That is taken from: http://www.searchenginehistory.com/ So looks like Excite then it was quickly replaced by Yahoo directory style search. I do remember Lycos being more prominent as well as looksmart and altavista... but when Google came out, I used it for finding new sites as I normally didn't 'search' much, just visited sites referred by friends etc.
altavister and not so sure about ask jeeves... but i know ask was pretty well known through Television ads
Altavista was *the* search engine before Google, but it got too cluttered and the results weren't that great either. I remember that in 2000, when I first saw Google, I was impressed by its simplicity, especially of the first page, but also of the rest of the pages (which didn't have banner ads!). http://web.archive.org/web/20000621123027/http://www.altavista.com/ -- this is how altavista looked back then. And Yahoo was known for its directory, not for its search engine.
I remember Alta Vista being pretty popular back in those dark dark days of 1996... when I was still wondering why there was such a big fuss over that internet thing... now I couldn't live without it!!!
Altavista was my favorite, if I couldn't find what I wanted on Altavista, then I would use Lycos. Can't really remember the names of other ones I used, but there were a few about. Cheers James
Altavista, Lycos and Angelfire were the early players, then came along Yahoo which became my favorite because it returned so many results but it takes a while like 2-3 minutes for it to do so, since back then the connections were 56k and 128k. Then Google came along where searching was just done in nano seconds.lol
anyone ever watch a TV channel on cable called Tech TV? There was some show on there with these 2 guys that were funny and rebuilt computers, and had other informative computer techy stuff. I was watching it one night back in mid 98 the older guy was doing a search engine review. And they mentioned some little known one called google. They constantly mentioned it on that show after that. I started using it the very next day. Google is one of the most amazing companies ever. 10 years from basically nothing to this monsterous company that effects almost everyone on the planet that has internet access. As of today they are worth 151 billion and have just under 13 billion CASH on the books. And the most amazing part of google is they don't have to care, their customer base is locked in for a long time. Yet they still run the company extremely well. Just imagine having 99% of all internet users on the planet as your customer.