There was a land before GOOGLE REALLY there was :)

Yes there was something we used before Google and for me it was dictionaries and index cards at the library to look up what we were trying to learn or figure out in a book out there somewhere (whew) that was a mouthful huh lol!!

Enjoy may your day or evening where ever in the world you may live be a great one smile to if you can it will either make someone's day or not or it could but will not till later who knows :)

Kimberly
TV REALITY MOM

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http://media.bemyapp.com/land-google/

The Land Before Google

June 23, 2016 by "Penguin" Pete Trbovich

A Brief History of the Search Engines Preceding Google

The Google search engine and the advent of the modern Internet age seems so ground-breaking that it isn’t too far a stretch to imagine that future historians might date years as “B.G.” for before Google. Imagining a time before a worldwide, fast search engine prods one to visions of darkness and chaos. Well, the web did still function without Google, sort of…

Pre-WWW Search

In 1991, the center of Internet facilitation was not Silicon Valley, but rather the University of Minnesota. Programmer Mark P. McCahill there developed the Gopher protocol. In these days, the Internet was still largely composed of BBSs (Bulletin Board Systems), dial-up phone modems, text terminals, shell commands, and very little else. Finding anything you didn’t know about already was as good as a black art. Gopher was designed not to search web pages – the WWW was still in the research phase – but to access directories on remote computers and find file names, nothing more.

We’ll explain Gopher anyway, but we hate to steal the thunder of Tim McLain, this dapper dude in a fedora who can give you the complete history in 20 minutes:

As a “distributed document delivery service,” Gopher was the first Google. You asked it for something, and it would “gopher” it. If it could find it, that is. To this day, you can find web browsers that support the Gopher protocol, including a plug-in available for Firefox.

Around this same time, there was Archie, likewise born by school staff at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Archie was even simpler; it indexed file FTP archives, being even a little more limited than Gopher. The name came from a pun on the word ‘archive.’ A little later, programmers at University of Reno, Nevada, wrote Veronica, which was a search engine for Gopher itself as well as being the companion program to Archie.

We can’t even dawdle on this point, for we have far more ground to cover!

Jerry and David’s Yahoo! Adventure

Stanford University, 1994, Jerry Yang and David Filo started a web page on this new-fangled Internet protocol that was just catching on, called the World Wide Web. So they set up a web page – in painful Netscape-Navigator HTML – called “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web” which was, yet again, another directory. But this time instead of locally hosted files, it used hypertext links to other web pages hosted on other servers.

Their directory grew (and grew… and greeeeeww…) into the business that became known as Yahoo! Here’s an early gem of a TV commercial:

Yes, the first major commercial search engine was advertised for its dating service potential.

Yahoo! has since joined AOL and Radio Shack in the category of “tech companies that used to be relevant but now nobody knows what keeps them in business.” Yes, around this time, you could not open a newspaper or magazine without an AOL CD falling out, loudly trumpeting an ever-increasing number of hours free in sappy ’90s graphics.

And likely as not, you at least tried Yahoo! But AOL was jealous because they wanted to be the web portal too, so they increasingly tried to offer directory and search-like services as well. And they weren’t the only ones competing for your click.

The Butler and the Dog

The other two search engines of note from this era were AskJeeves and Lycos. Ask.com is the surviving effigy of AskJeeves.com, and you’d think they were ashamed of their former search engine offering the way they’ve buried him! This is the only commercial we can find surviving:

…from the brief UK-only revival in the late 2000s. You’re better off getting a DVD copy of the Star Wars Holiday Special from George Lucas than you are getting Ask.com to let you revisit AskJeeves. Anyway, Jeeves was set up with the idea that you asked a question in English, grammar and punctuation and all, and then the dapper butler would assist your query.

Meanwhile, there was Lycos – oh, Lycos!

Lycos was the most tragic victim of the Dot-Com Bubble burst. This plucky company deserved to win out based on their enthusiasm, but they were just a few steps too slow for the Google-naut. Lycos was geared more towards being a web-based Yellow Pages anyway.

The Failing of Early Search Engines

In retrospect, it’s easy to see where the pre-Google search engines failed.

First, they didn’t think big enough. Over and over, web search engines kept failing to guess the explosive pace of web growth. They kept trying to nail the web into one model after another, only to see it explode into something new. It was a newspaper, a shopping mall, a library directory! It seemed to double in user base every month. No matter how hard they struggled to get a handle on the web, their most long-reaching visions still proved short-sighted.

Second, none of them truly anticipated what consumers wanted in a search engine. All of the early search engines were built with the assumption that every click should end in a sale. In frustration, they all turned against each other, trying to monetize user clicks by keeping them on the site as long as possible. Each site became a web portal, a destination in its own right, trying to offer mail, search, a home page, and even a social network of sorts. Please, we’ll give you anything, just stay! But ultimately staying is the opposite of what you want a search engine for. Search engines should have the same function as a freeway, designed to get you from where you are to where you want to be as fast as possible.

Yahoo, AOL, Ask, and Lycos all exist in some form right now, but only as stomped tar pits of their former selves, left puddled in the tracks of Google.

What Google Got Right

Menlo Park, California, in a garage in 1998: two guys named Larry Page and Sergey Brin were about to show those uppity university folk how a search engine is done. Google has made much ado about their starting motto, simply “don’t be evil.” That carried a lot of weight in 1998. The Microsoft antitrust case was fresh in the courts; the AT&T antitrust case was still fresh in the news. Dot-com bubbles were blowing up and bursting all around. Google knew what consumers were really crying for: one technology company that just gave you what you wanted and then got out of your way.

To this day, you type in a box, hit enter, click a link, you’re there. Google, for 99% of the times its home page is accessed, goes by in a blur. Surprisingly enough, their business model is built on the trust gained from allowing the public to treat it like a free utility. In 1998, Google was this candy-colored logo and a couple buttons, but it was amazing what it had under the hood. It didn’t try to hard-sell you something, but got you the answers you needed in the time you needed them. It turns out that most search queries don’t end in selling something, but it also turns out that the web’s business model is fine with that.