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What was the first search engine you used? | Log In/Create an Account | Top | 78 comments | Search Discussion
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  • (Score: 1) by pTamok on Monday April 13 2015, @03:23PM

    by pTamok (3042) on Monday April 13 2015, @03:23PM (#169751)

    I would guess at the first search 'engine' to be my brain and a book with an index, although pre-dating that, a fast flip through the pages looking at subject headings.

    A dictionary. A phone directory. The Yellow Pages.

    I remember school projects where I would use Encyclopaedia Britannica's 'Micropædia' to find topics, which were expanded upon using the ' Macropædia'.

    A library index (all those small cards held in long drawers) [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_catalog [wikipedia.org] ]

    On computers, I'm surprised non-one has mentioned Gopher [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_%28protocol%29 [wikipedia.org] ], which is an Internet search engine, just not a World-Wide-Web search engine, and of course, Veronica, Jughead and Archie.

  • (Score: 2) by jasassin on Monday April 13 2015, @08:30PM

    by jasassin (3566) <jasassin@gmail.com> on Monday April 13 2015, @08:30PM (#169963) Homepage Journal

    I chose Archie, but I was really thinking gopher. Gopher was pretty awesome. Next best thing to trading ftp lists on the EFNet IRC #warez channels.

    --
    jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A

    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 14 2015, @09:18AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 14 2015, @09:18AM (#170292)

      The gopher search engine was Veronica. Gopher was the "previous WWW".

  • (Score: 2) by VortexCortex on Friday April 17 2015, @07:21AM

    by VortexCortex (4067) on Friday April 17 2015, @07:21AM (#171926)

    False dichotomy, it can be BOTH. The Internet Yellowpages was exactly how we looked up addresses when I first started using the "Internet". You would literally flip through a big dead-tree book in order to "search".

  • (Score: 2) by fritsd on Saturday April 25 2015, @09:47AM

    by fritsd (4586) on Saturday April 25 2015, @09:47AM (#175003) Journal

    I thought of gopher as well. Didn't you have to crawl up to some kind of site in Minnesota, and then back down again to find the site you wanted to visit?

    Long live the WWW! Now if only DNS can be made non-hierarchical as well..