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Comment by flaktrak | Hacker News Reader

One year away from being annoyed at the web to being blown away by yahoo.com. A friend searched for some game or something on yahoo and I was like what is the trickery?

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I feel like such a hipster for having used AltaVista and Dogpile as search engines.

And Astalavista.

yep, astalavista.box.sk, still remember the full domain by heart... :)

Edit: OMG it's still alive..

code.box.sk was my favorite resource on programming languages then. The whole *.box.sk was amazing.

My god, it even uses tables for the layout, takes you back uh?

Check out hacker news.

Of course it's alive. Check the whois data for that IP, hosted by "ANTIK Telecom". :-)

Hipster huh? Well what about Lycos, remember that search engine?

Oh yeah. Vividly.

HotBot was where it was at.

Remember the search aggregators, like Magellan (maybe Columbus? Something like that) that searched X different engines and aggregated the results in a desktop app for you to use?

Then I found Google, and I never used anything else again.

That was Copernic. (After Copernicus) I remember using it and there was a list of perhaps 20 engines. I remember the first to return (like, would return in 1 second not 30 seconds for the rest) was google.

Every single time, google was the first back. It wasn't always ranked the top result back then, but it was fast.

Yes! That's it. Yeah, Google came and blew everything else out of the water. I remember searching for an ocx file for something that wouldn't run, and everything kept returning some spam sites. I somehow stumbled upon Google, after some recommendation, and tried it, and the first result was a legitimate download of the actual file.

It's not hard to see why everyone switched to it.

That's what Dogpile did - at one point - albeit as a regular browser search engine, which was its allure to me. I often got better results than on Google, which must have been around their formative stages.

What is hipster about that? Your statement makes no sense.

I'm 46 and started using the "internet" in 1992 - usenet, gopher, FTP et al. Then came the World Wide Web". Altavista was really all there was before google, why is that "hipster"?

That's like saying you were a hipster for using horse and carriage before Henry Ford started mass producing cars.

If anything being an early adopter of Google seems more "hipster" than using Altavista. Gawd, I musta been and early hipster, how much more "hipster" can you get than that.

Between Altavista and Google, alltheweb.com (FAST Search) also had their day. I was in charge of a major web portal around 2001, and we were contracting out site search queries to FAST. One day I got a call from a new company named Google. The guy said he could give me a better price than FAST. I asked what price. He said, "Any price."

lol that's great. Wonderful to think that even Larry and Sergey had to hustle. Everyone has to put in their time.

Little nugget:

the FAST Search guys sold alltheweb.com to yahoo.com and focused on enterprise search (i.e. they sell/license their software to companies) with customers such as newspaper companies, yellow pages companies and government agencies. They were then acquired by Microsoft a few years ago and rolled into their Sharepoint offerings.

Dont forget northern light. It was a great search engine targeted at researchers and academics that grouped results in folders of topic areas. They made the unfortunate business decision to transition to a paid service right as google was becoming popular.

To have used Altavista or Dogpile one must have either been on the internet before it was cool, or made a deliberately retro choice of search engine. Either qualifies for hipsterdom.

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