President of WebFX. Bill has over 25 years of experience in the Internet marketing industry specializing in SEO, UX, information architecture, marketing automation and more. William's background in scientific computing and education from Shippensburg and MIT provided the foundation for MarketingCloudFX and other key research and development projects at WebFX.

In the heydays of the Internet – when Google wasn’t the only search engine people used to seek information on the web – web surfers (I bet you haven’t heard that term in a while) had several options for finding what they needed on the net.

This article harks back to the days of AltaVista, HotBot, and when Ask was still Ask Jeeves. You’ll see how the web designs of ubiquitous search engines of the past have evolved through time. Put your nostalgia hats on as we travel back to the ancient times of the Internet!

And I bet after looking at some of these designs, you understand why effective web design is so important.

HotBot

2009

Excite

WebCrawler

Ask Jeeves (now Ask.com)

Yahoo!

Google

Dogpile

AltaVista

2009

Lycos

MSN Search (now Bing)

AOL Search

Infoseek (now Go.com)

Netscape Search

MetaCrawler

All the Web

What was your favorite search engine (before Google)? How did search engines affect you in the early days of the web? Share your thoughts and opinions in the comments.

* Screenshots courtesy of the Internet Archive: Wayback Machine

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