I can't be the only person to remember using search aggregators (aka "meta search engines") because every individual search engine was so bad and incomplete on its own, especially outside the US.
The "major" search engines before Google were Yahoo and Altavista, who were too busy trying to sell you a foggy concept of being "the Internet's start page" to be of any practical use when you actually wanted to find something specific. And of course plenty of people were stuck in their own ridiculous AOL microcosm.
Not only were the search engines lackluster and incomplete, the search results were also simply not very relevant. Often you'd only get good results because there simply wasn't enough content indexed for your queries to be in any way ambiguous but good luck if you were looking for anything you couldn't pin down to one or two very explicit search terms.
Kids these days don't know how good they have it with their Googles and their smartpads.
Oh yeah, before Google came along I used Metacrawler, which would search about 8 search engines and compiled the results. It was a big improvement over Webcrawler, which I had used previously. Searching was really bad back then compared to now. I remember having to wade through lots of irrelevant search results to find what I wanted.
The moment I discovered Google in early 2000, I dumped Metacrawler and never went back.
The "major" search engines before Google were Yahoo and Altavista, who were too busy trying to sell you a foggy concept of being "the Internet's start page" to be of any practical use when you actually wanted to find something specific. And of course plenty of people were stuck in their own ridiculous AOL microcosm.
Not only were the search engines lackluster and incomplete, the search results were also simply not very relevant. Often you'd only get good results because there simply wasn't enough content indexed for your queries to be in any way ambiguous but good luck if you were looking for anything you couldn't pin down to one or two very explicit search terms.
Kids these days don't know how good they have it with their Googles and their smartpads.