When you find yourself trying to remember a show (or any works) that's on the tip of your tongue but just out of reach, come here - the collective brain of the TVTropes community can probably help. Post all the details you can remember (examples help). If you're looking for a trope, head over to Trope Finder. Have general questions about tropes? Visit Ask The Tropers!
There was Lycos back in the day.
There was also a search aggregator software called Copernic, if you can find a screenshot you may get a list of search engines...
"And as long as a sack of shit is not a good thing to be, chivalry will never die."
Archie was the very first search engine in 1990, according to this result to my Google search "old search engines":
"Ever since the world wide web became the engine of our lives, search has been the holy grail for developers and companies. Beginning with Archie in 1990, considered the first search engine, moving on to Excite and Lycos and Infoseek, by the mid 90s there was a veritable flood of search engines, particularly after Google showed how it should be done in 1996. The complexity of the algorithms was now matched only by the voracious appetite of searchers as the number of pages to be indexed ran into billions. Invariably, a lot of them positioned themselves as specialized engines—for kids or jobs or tech or entertainment. Then came the deep web search engines like https://www.deepdyve.com/
which indexed obscure and often not-easy to find content.
Post-Google, there were the much touted “google killers" including Cuil (pronounced Cool ) and Dogpile. While the former is no more, the latter is now just a Google clone. Unbelievably, there have also been those that have tried to go the human-powered search way! With a million plus spam pages being generated every day besides the billions of legitimate ones, you would imagine most humans would be daunted.
As the original super spider, Alta Vista, shuts down, here’s a brief history of some of the better known search engines through the years:
1990: Archie—the very first search engine
1991: Veronica and Jughead
1992: Vlib
1993: Excite and World wide web wanderer
1994: Alta Vista, Galaxy, Yahoosearch, Infoseek, Webcrawler, Lycos
1995: Looksmart
1996: Google, Hot Bot, Inktomi
1997: Ask.com
1998: MSN; dmoz
1999: Alltheweb
2005: Snap
2006: Microsoft Livesearch
2008: Cuil
2009: Microsoft Bing
Source: https://www.wordstream.com/articles/internet-search-engines-history"
Does Askjeeves count, and what about Duckduckgo?
Dear Tropers,
We all know Google of course. And Yahoo. Many of us know Infoseek and Excite. Can you please share with me the names (and possibly more info) of VERY early search engines or internet directory sites?
Do not limit yourself to the web (WWW) please. Gopher sites are welcome. And also 'sites' that could be used to search (or 'surf'/access) BBS (Bulletin Board Systems).
(To the TV Tropes moderators: I hope such a broad/general question like this is allowed.)
(EDIT: I replaced 'BB Ss' with BBS as the former was being interpretated as a 'link')
Edited by ththth10