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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.

HotBot was where it was at.

Oh yeah. Vividly.