Don't forget HotBot--I recall hearing someone say it was going to be bigger than AltaVista, but then Google came along...
My goodness this thread is making me feel VERY old. For everyone saying the first search engines was GOOGLE?!?! (I think your showing your age there too!).... Here is a nice article that explains the "history" pretty well. http://www.webreference.com/authoring/search_history/ A quick recap: Archie - 1990 by Alan Emtage at McGill University. Searchable list of all files found on anonymous ftp sites. Gopher - 1991 by Mark McCahill at University of Minnesota. World Wide Web Wanderer - 1993 - MIT student Matthew Gray creates the webs first "robot". ALIWEB - 1993 by Martijn Koster. Allowed used to submit pages to the index. And then corporate America realizes there is money to be had.... Excite - 1993 Yahoo - 1994 Webcrawler - 1994 - The first full text search engine. Lycos - 1994 InfoSeek - 1995 Alta Vista - 1995 - natural language search, photos and more Inktomi - 1996 Dogpile - 1996 Ask Jeeves - 1997 Google - 1997 MSN Search - 1998
You could also look at the way back machine thing where you can see what the homepage of a site use to look like and things.