Old Search Engines

Heh - it’s funny - I’ve forgotten about some of these guys.

Yeah, it used to be a whole lot different - search engines were an emerging concept and they all had a pretty rough time ‘finding their way’ in branding, failing to really establish their presence in the marketplace, let alone dominance.

The strongest engines (the ones that survive today seem to be the ones that capitalized on their success elsewhere.

Yahoo was a wildly popular directory (or central resource for finding interesting sites quickly). Today directories are rarely used by end-users, at least not the way they were back then, most are little more than fodder for link building.

MSN was a pretty popular community/content portal. They were among the first to really perfect the concepts of communities & online content. Their marketplace presence was heavily subsidized by the inclusion of IE (with MSN.com as a the default homepage) in 99% of PCs sold throughout the 90s. Combined with the ISP war tactics, $300 off a new PC if you sign up for MSN dial-up (this was ‘back in the day’ of course), Microsoft carved out a nice online extension to it’s already dominant operating system brand.

Then Google come’s along and says people should have to dig down through dozens of levels of directory hierarchy to get to the information they want, and they should have to look through hundreds of listed pages to find the most important/authorative sites… thus ’search’ as we know it today was born.

The rest is history… and news.

I recently took a look back over time to see how search engine homepages have changed over the years. It was interesting that Google today looks virtually unchanged, while the other engines have changed remarkably.

Here’s some more screen caps of the search engine homepage changes over time.