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Comment by siggen | Hacker News Reader

If I remember correctly, Altavista produced better results than Google back then, for me at least. However, Altavista took seconds to load the first page (on 56k) whereas Google's first page loaded almost immediately.

I honestly didn't expect Google to have survived the dot-com bust back then. This was before they figured out online adword auctions.

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Google was immediately better then anything else from day one. Google was launched in Fall of 1997. In January 98 is when I started using it and it was hands down better then crawlers or any other search engine.

I fear all we have now is anecdotal evidence. :-) In my case, it was a gradual conversion to Google from Altavista than something immediate.

So, funny thing: Back then, if one search engine didn't have what you were looking for, you would try another. Now, if Google doesn't have what you are looking for, where do you go? Does it mean the answer does not exist on the Internet? Do you try Bing or Duck?

Duck is Bing.

https://www.quora.com/How-is-the-Bing-API-used-by-DuckDuckGo

There are effectively only two competitive search engines in the U.S. and European markets today. In those markets, Bing is the only market pressure keeping Google honest.

Did Duck Duck Go use Google previously? I thought when I first started using it years ago it was using google on the back end.

DDG is just a whitelabeled Bing? That's interesting.

There are only three major worldwide English language indexes—Google, Bing and Yandex. For all the praise DDG gets here, it couldn't exist without Bing.

yandex is what I try second

I think I started using the internet in 1997, and used Altavista because the results were better than Google. Wasn't until ~2000 that I began to find results on Google faster than Altavista.

It was probably subjective but IMO google wasn't better initially, but it did end up being the best. Even tho I use bing or ddg, Google still has the best search engine.

It was also an order of magnitude faster (a fraction of a second for results vs. several seconds).

> However, Altavista took seconds to load the first page (on 56k) whereas Google's first page loaded almost immediately.

That's why I moved from Altavista to Google. Google had a minimalist homepage and results page which were focussed and loaded very quickly compared to the bloated pages (for the time) of Altavista and Yahoo.

AV did also offer a minimalist site, raging.com, after Google appeared. Going to the site today, it still tries to redirect to https://www.altavista.com/web/text?raging=1/

This was my experience as well. I had a deep link to AltaVista's "advanced" search page which loaded plenty fast.

Between AV and InfoSeek (which I used the Netscape plugin to get a browser search bar for) I was seeing better results than Google until sometime in the mid-00's.

Sure if you wanted to skim the surface of what was available on a given topic or just wanted the most popular links, Google was fine in the 90's and early 00's; But if you were deep diving or wanted something more obscure you needed other search engines.

Huh, it took me a while to switch to Google because every time I tried it it took longer. I only switched when it became reliably faster.

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