CATEGORY // SEARCH_ENGINES

[ AltaVista Query ]
query="<search>" site="www"

1995 RESTORED

AltaVista

Digital Equipment Corporation's flagship search engine. Known for advanced full-text search and the first widespread use of web indexing at scale.

Crawler DEC Full-Text

▶ Launch Archive

[ Yahoo! Directory ]
Browse > Computers > Software

1994 RESTORED

Yahoo!

Originally "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web." A manually curated directory that became the first major internet portal.

Directory Human-Curated Portal

▶ Launch Archive

[ WebCrawler Results ]
Found 14,203 documents

1994 PARTIAL

WebCrawler

The first search engine to index entire web pages (not just titles). Pioneered full-text web search for the general public.

Crawler UMass Early NLP

▶ Launch Archive

[ Excite Smart Search ]
Natural Language Query

1994 RESTORED

Excite

Featured "Smart Search" using natural language processing. Allowed users to type questions instead of just keywords.

Crawler NLP Personalization

▶ Launch Archive

[ Lycos Index ]
Processing spider threads...

1995 RESTORED

Lycos

Born from Carnegie Mellon's research. Featured aggressive spidering, fast indexing, and the iconic spider mascot.

Crawler CMU Fast Index

▶ Launch Archive

[ Dogpile Meta-Search ]
Querying 6 engines...

1996 PARTIAL

Dogpile

Early meta-search engine that aggregated results from InfoSeek, WebCrawler, Lycos, Excite, and Northern Light.

Meta Aggregator Multi-Query

▶ Launch Archive

[ Archie FTP Index ]
Matching pattern: *.txt

1990 FRAGMENT

Archie

The first searchable database for files on the internet. Pre-dated the World Wide Web, indexing FTP archives.

FTP Pre-Web McGill

▶ Launch Archive

[ Gopher Menu Tree ]
Select > Browse > Info

1991 RESTORED

Gopher

Hierarchical protocol for locating and retrieving distributed documents. Dominated the early academic internet before HTTP.

Protocol Menu-Tree University

▶ Launch Archive