Earlier this week, we had a very interesting conversation over on our Facebook page about people’s favorite search engine and why. Most said Google, some said Bing, and some sarcastically brought up some blasts from the search world’s past. It got us thinking about hot search engines of yesteryear, and how we used the Internet back in the dial-up-into-AOL days.
There’s an amazingly ironic search you can do on Google: punch the query ‘search engine’ into the… search engine… and look at what shows up first.
Dogpile, Bing, and AltaVista. Remember Dogpile? I used it a bit back in the late ’90’s, when search was still young and metasearch was the best way to find what you were looking for. It was – and remains today – a solid search engine, providing good results by looking at multiple search engines.
But what happened? Dogpile was one of many up-and-coming, technologically advanced, new and exciting search engines. This was before the word ‘search’ was replaced in Internet users’ vocabularies by the word ‘Google’ (and to a lesser, but growing, extent, ‘Bing’).
So, to the point of the article, where are these engines now? We dug through a pretty big sample of search traffic to see how much was sent by some of our old favorites – AltaVista, Lycos, Excite, Webcrawler, Metacrawler, and Dogpile. We also pulled data for some of the new, hot, technologically advanced engines – Blekko and Duck Duck Go. Here’s what we found:
Webcrawler – which was my search engine of choice pre-Google – seems to have the most traffic of them all. InfoSpace – which owns Dogpile, Webcrawler, and Metacrawler – seems to be doing fairly well in the small-search space. Some engines have declined a ridiculous amount. While historical search engine market share data is pretty hard to find, one old SEO article lists out 1999 market shares – AltaVista had 11.4%, Excite had 15.6%, Lycos was at 3%, and Webcrawler had 3.1%.
The numbers do present a bit of concern for today’s hot search startups – both Duck Duck Go and Blekko are outgunned by almost all of the Search Old Guard. Hopefully their dedication to the user and tremendous SEO tools can help them become real players in the market, or at least expensive acquisitions for one of the Big 3.
Apparently, the best thing you can do as a search engine – besides provide industry-leading results and spider billions of pages – is to turn yourself into a verb. Nobody ever said ‘I’m going to go AltaVista some recipes,’ or ‘let me Webcrawler that for you.’ But ‘I’m going to go Google the venue’ is fairly common. ‘I’m going to Bing it’ is also catching on a bit, thanks to some clever marketing by Microsoft.
So what search engine did you use in the 90’s, and what are you using today?
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