In the heydays of the Internet – when Google wasn’t the only search engine people used to seek information on the web – web surfers (I bet you haven’t heard that term in a while) had several options for finding what they needed on the net. This article harks back to the days of AltaVista, HotBot, and when Ask was still Ask Jeeves. You’ll see how the web designs of ubiquitous search engines of the past have evolved through time.
Put your nostalgia hats on as we travel back to the ancient times of the Internet! And I bet after looking at some of these designs, you understand why effective web design is so important.
HotBot
1997
1999
2009
Excite
1996
1998
2009
WebCrawler
1996
1998
2009
Ask Jeeves (now Ask.com)
1999
2009
Yahoo!
1996
2009
The future
1998
2009
Dogpile
1998
2009
AltaVista
1998
2009
Lycos
1996
1998
2009
MSN Search (now Bing)
1999
2009
AOL Search
1999
2009
Infoseek (now Go.com)
1997
2009
Netscape Search
1999
2009
MetaCrawler
1996
1998
2009
All the Web
1999
2009
What was your favorite search engine (before Google)?
How did search engines affect you in the early days of the web? Share your thoughts and opinions in the comments. * Screenshots courtesy of the Internet Archive: Wayback Machine
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