I was watching The Big Bang Theory the other night, Season 10 – episode 16 titled “Failure to Launch” and in that episode Sheldon discloses his three favorite now defunct search engines; MSN Search, AltaVista and Ask Jeeves.
It made me a little sad because I know all too well each of these and how popular they were for a time before Google ruled the world.
In fact, way back in 1997 my wife Denise and I were hosting the now defunct www.webtvsig.com a website about the now defunct box you used to connect your television to the Internet via a dialup modem. Our website was the one stop shop for information about this device, our site was a big deal and itself had been featured in a number of books, and even featured on a television show called MSNBC’s “The Site” with Soledad O’Brien.
In the course of running our website we held a contest and gave away some prize to the party that could name the most search engines, because the web was new, it was interesting for our community, and most of all we obtained the aggregate benefit of getting all of the submissions.
Mr. Michael Newman was the winner, who knows how many entries we received, but for old times sake I will publish the list here. AltaVista and AskJeeves are both on the list and I thought about this when I saw the show, with just a little sadness.
You can see our original webpage on Archive.org. It looked totally different on WebTV, but on a PC it was always ugly. Mind you I had to edit text files by hand in a text editor back in the day. I sure am happy we don’t need to do that anymore.
If anyone would like to test each link, leave the number working in the comments! 😎
Reprinted from WebTVSIG.com
1)OPEN TEXT
2) HOTBOT
3) DEJA NEWS
4) BIGFOOT
5) WORLDWIDE WEB WORM
6) MAGELLAN
7) INREFERENCE
8) ROCKMALL
9) LYCOS
10) INFOSEEK
11) EXCITE
12) YAHOO
13) WEBCRAWLER
14) ALLWEB
15) ALTAVISTA
16) GALAXY
17) LINKSTAR
18) LINKMONSTER
19) FILEZ
20) SWITCHBOARD
21) STARTING POINT
22) WWW.YELLOW PAGES
23) LINKMASTER
24) NERDWORLD
25) ALIWEB
26) MONSTER MAGAZINE LIST
27) NET NAVIGATOR
28) AAA WORLD ANNOUNCE
29) WEB://441/4.0
30)SITESEEKER
31) ELECTRONIC NEWSSTAND
32) LEO
33) INFOHIWAY
34)I-Explore
35) INDENTIFY
36) AMERICAN DIR. ASST.
37) WWWOMEN
38)ACCOMMODATION SEARCH ENGINE
39) WHAT’S NEW
40) WHAT’S NEW TOO
41)ACCOMMODATION SEARCH ENGINE
42) YPN DIRECTORY
43) SURFPOINT
44)ACCOMMODATION SEARCH ENGINE
45) APOLLO
46) BIZWEB
47) INTERNET ADDRESS FINDER
48) WHOWHERE
49) ASK SHERLOCK SEARCH ENGINE
50) CYBER 411
51) MOTHERLOAD
52) MAMMA
53) METASEARCH
54) INTERNET SLEUTH
55) SEARCH.COM
56) PROFUSION
57) PRIMESEARCH
58) FRAMESEARCH
59)SEARCH.ONRAMP.NET
60) METASEARCH AT HIGHWAY 61
61) INFERENCE FIND
62) METACRAWLER
63) SUPERSEEK
64) USE IT!
65) SAVY SEARCH
66) SNOOPIE
68) ENVIRONMENTAL ORG. WEB DIR.
69) GLOBAL ONLINE DIRECTORY
70) JUMPCITY
71) DISINFORMATION
72) ELECTRIC LIBRARY
73) METROSCOPE
74) COMFIND
75) DINESITE
76) ONEKEY
77) PLANET SEARCH
78) SITEWINDER SMARTSEARCH
79) WEBSURFER
80) WHAT-U-SEEK
81) EDUCATION WORLD SEARCH
82) WORLD EMAIL DIRECTORY
83) FORUM ONE
84) Dog Pile
85) Virtual Sites
86) Virtual Reference Desk
87) eDirectory
88) The Ultimate White Pages
89) Doras
90) On Village
91) Ask Jeeves
92) All NY – New York Super Search
