What is/was your favorite Search engine?

[Dimitri]

Hi,

Of all times, my favorite search engine was Altavista. I don't mean it was providing better results that nowaday's search engines. I mean, the one which I enjoyed the most... I might be wrong, but to me, it was the first to have a crawler and therefor was indexing "lot" of sites, and so was not just a directory, like Yahoo was initially. I remember finding this thrilling, and discovering a lot more sites, of all size. So, over all, this is my best "souvenir" of Search engines.

:)

[not2easy]

My all time favorite was Vivisimo, sort of like AltaVista with sorting filters. You know this topic comes up every so often. Here are some oldies:
[webmasterworld.com...] (2003)

Oh, and there's this one from 2017 - started by someone familiar ;)
[webmasterworld.com...]

[Dimitri]

Oh, and there's this one from 2017 - started by someone familiar ;)

omg, I didn't even remember this one :) but that is different :">, here I was talking about personal enjoyment at using a search engine, and not one to replace / compete with Google.

edit: by the way, regarding my old topic, WiseNut really sounded like THE big thing , and vaporized totally.

[Essex_boy]

Google, pre 2003

[RhinoFish]

Cuil, cuz the story was so intriguing.

[en.wikipedia.org...]

[lucy24]

At one time, people loved Ask Jeeves because you could express your query in ordinary human language. And then all the other search engines learned how to do the same thing and the advantage was lost.

[graeme_p]

Clusty, which I just foundstill exists as Yippy.

I might even give it another try.

[engine]

I quite liked Northern Light.
And for fun, kartoo.

[not2easy]

Clusty was spun off from Vivisimo, it was sort of like a limited version of Vivisimo. Thanks for the Yippy information graeme_p, I did not know what happened to it after Clusty. I will need to look.

[brotherhood of LAN]

AlltheWeb was decent, large index and relevant results. Google dances were fun, and their Pagerank updates.

[iamlost]

@engine: +1 for Northern Light. When it shut in 2002 I was adrift for almost a year before deciding Google was the best left.

@RhinoFish: +1 for Cuil. By 2008 the Google trajectory was looking potentially grim and I thought Cuil a potential disrupter.
Note: the 2010 Google symbiosis of Anna Patterson and the purchased Cuil patents, John Ginnandrea and the purchase of MetaWeb hardened to probable a, till then, only considered possible G-search trajectory; true as it turned out.

Default SEs: StartPage and SwissCows (relatively good Google and Bing results without the clutter and tracking).
Backup SEs: DuckDuckGo and Quant.

Note: my very personal best beloved SE is mine own site search. :) It allows me to play within constrained bounds with NLP, ML, marketing, etc. while improving sites' visitor experience. Gotta let the inner geek out every so often, business as usual is sooo ummm necessary but stultifying.

@brotherhood of LAN: Google dances were fun, and their Pagerank updates.
Oh my yes! Back when one could actually watch updates move across data centres; when results could vary widely depending on which data centre(s) answered a query; when Google was not yet the Collective.

[sem4u]

My favourite search engine prior to using Google was Altavista. I can also remember using Infoseek, Lycos, HotBot and many others.

I also remember the Google dances and looking on the different data centers for any changes :)

[JS_Harris]

Today? [duckduckgo.com...]

If you ask me tomorrow I may have a different answer. My loyalty to a search engine extends as far as their personal data recording efforts do, only in reverse.

[Dimitri]

In the early age of the Internet , in Europe, I remember that, the way to find sites (at least for me), was because computer magazines , were publishing their monthly selection of sites... This is how I found out that I could check the weather online! (instead of looking by the window)