This is the Old Internet Search Engine – As we know that nowadays more and more people are using Google to search for anything they want to know. Although the web became publicly available in 1990, the first web search engines did not come into existence until 1993. Until then, all websites were manually tracked and indexed by people. We may now admit that Google is king for web search engines, but Google wasn’t even around until 1998.

AltaVista
AltaVista became active in December 1995 and quickly became one of the most popular internet blogs search engines of the 1990s. Its popularity depends on the design of the search engine. AltaVista has the first full-text searchable database on the web that has an accessible and easy-to-use interface.

On the day of its launch, the site garnered more than 300,000 visitors. In two years, its daily traffic reached 80 million. AltaVista was the 11th most visited site on the web in 1998 and 2000. Indeed, at the turn of the millennium, 17 percent of all web users visited the site on a weekly basis.

In comparison, Google is only seven percent. In 2003, Overture purchased the site for $140 million, with Yahoo later acquiring Overture that same year. The site finally went offline in 2013.

Excite
Excite is one of the oldest search engines ever. Excite was founded in 1994, with the official website launching the following year. Its creators are six students from Stanford University, Graham Spencer, Joe Kraus, Mark VanHaren, Ryan McIntyre, Ben Lutch, and Martin Reinfried.

Excite was one of the first search engines to provide more than just search. When the site went live in 1995, Excite also offered portals for news and weather, email services, instant messaging services, stock quotes, and a fully customizable homepage. In 1996, Excite purchased WebCrawler and signed exclusive agreements with many of today’s largest technology companies, including Microsoft and Apple.

Excite famously offered Google’s entire business for just $750,000 in 1999 after Sergey Brin and Larry Page decided it was taking up too much of their study time. The CEO at the time, George Bell, decided the price was too high and canceled the deal. Today, Google has a net worth of $900 billion, making Excite’s decision one of the most expensive business mistakes of all time.

Yahoo
Yahoo was founded in 1994 with its site operating in 1995. This site was the most famous of all search engines before Google existed. Despite several difficult periods, including multiple purchases, poor visitor numbers, and questionable product decisions, Yahoo is still a tech giant.

By 2021, several of its other services including Yahoo News, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Finance, and Yahoo Sports, are all gaining tens of millions of views per day. Like Google, Yahoo also has a number of failed products including Yahoo Games, Yahoo Music, Yahoo Messenger, and the Yahoo Directory. However, Yahoo is still the 11th most visited site in the world in 2021.