75% got Go? Probably trying to type in "google"... this was before google's rise to prominence. Though there are a lot of other search websites on here...
I remember using WebCrawler the most when my family first got online with AOL. But there were so many competitors. I also regularly used Lycos and Yahoo and I think sometimes Xoom. No one search engine was perfect, usually far from it, so you'd often try several to collate the results. Then AltaVista came along and for a while that was the gold standard that everyone used... then AltaVista Digital.. AskJeeves was around at the same time as this but I rarely used it. And then finally Google showed up and pretty quickly everyone stopped using anything else because it was so much better. Though Yahoo stubbornly held on for quite a while, and was especially popular in some overseas territories like India, I think.
Also due to the fact that search engines were not great at the time I think is a big part of why you see so many of the top sites are these "portal" websites - places where you could go to get news, weather, and various other information, edited by people manually who would find interesting stuff on the Internet and put it all together in one place - so you didn't have to go out searching for it you could just click on links.
My friend Mike actually ran his own website like this for a while... on his he collected all of the weirdest, most bizarre and extremely niche stuff that you could find on the Internet and posted links and short reviews of that.
most of it other than the text is missing, but here's a copy courtesy of the Wayback Machine. Ah... the exploding whale video... Conan the Agrarian... brings back memories.
My cousin Ritchie had a modem and Internet access back in the 1980s. We would use it mostly to visit bulletin boards and we played this one really really primitive text-based science fiction game.
My friend Chris had a Prodigy or Compuserv account back around 1992 I think. Can't remember which. About all it was good for was checking e-mail and a couple other things- but getting online was really expensive so we didn't do it much.
My family got an AOL account sometime around 1994, I think. I remember visiting the Nintendo Power Source a lot (AOL exclusive site, so not actually a website), as well as the AOL chat rooms. I used WebCrawler to search the world wide web most of the time until AltaVista Digital came along which was superior. The start pages of all the computers at my high school were set to either Netscape or Yahoo.
Most of these are familiar to me. Never heard of Primenet, Well (though I looked it up and it's interesting), GNN, Webcom, or Simplenet- or maybe I just forgot. These were early services that sold people Internet access and then had their own portal to help people find and access online content (essentially the latter service google provides now, in the early days there was no company that had such a monopoly); or they were webhosting services that allowed individuals to create their own web pages- something else very common in those days as you can see by the results.
I have no idea what "Digital" is, I couldn't even find information on that website so I wasn't sure what category to put it in.
My friend Mike actually ran his own website like this for a while... on his he collected all of the weirdest, most bizarre and extremely niche stuff that you could find on the Internet and posted links and short reviews of that.
My friend Chris had a Prodigy or Compuserv account back around 1992 I think. Can't remember which. About all it was good for was checking e-mail and a couple other things- but getting online was really expensive so we didn't do it much.
My family got an AOL account sometime around 1994, I think. I remember visiting the Nintendo Power Source a lot (AOL exclusive site, so not actually a website), as well as the AOL chat rooms. I used WebCrawler to search the world wide web most of the time until AltaVista Digital came along which was superior. The start pages of all the computers at my high school were set to either Netscape or Yahoo.
I have no idea what "Digital" is, I couldn't even find information on that website so I wasn't sure what category to put it in.
My best lucky get "American Greetings" when I was just typing in names of greeting cards companies...haha.