16 May 2007

How would you search on the net before Google?

I am a search engine junkie. You ask me to find something on the Net and I will be on it figuring what key words to use etc. Even after finding what I had to I would keep looking since I would have found something else to distract me!!!

What was I like before the Internet. Well we had a mammoth Encyclopaedia Britannica. You could spend hours reading and searching for stuff. I would constantly move between different volumes since there would be a reference in another volume for a sub section (which was of no importance) but my parents thought I was learning something and not wasting my time playing in the sun.

Before Google, searching on the net was mostly a lottery. You actually ended up looking through many search engines and still not find the exact thing. My favourite ones were Lycos, Hotbot, Excite, Dogpile and the big daddy AltaVista. Yahoo! had different system of indexing and I never got excited with that.

Uptill Google showed up and proved that all these systems were silly, you could actually waste time in offices and pretend that you are doing research. Now you hit a search on Google and 9 out of 10 times you get what you want. Damm!

Gone are the days of searching through lakhs(millions for you Amrikaans) of search results and finding your info like Christopher Columbus. Google has taken the joy out of search engines.

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