Hey guys, today I have a fun blog post for you all that will take you on a journey back in time to around the time when I got my first job in the internet marketing industry 20 years ago and make you feel all nostalgic.

Courtesy of the Way Back Machine I have put together a few screenshots of what some of the popular search engines looked like back in the year 2000/2001. Back then there was a little bit more choice then there is nowadays and it wasn’t just all about Google, Bing and Yahoo.

As you can see from these pics the search engines have changed a lot since back then except for perhaps Google which still looks very similar.

I hope that you enjoy these old search engine pictures which are listed in alphabetical order and I have come up with a little bit of information about each one for you to check out.

Altavista Search Engine in 2001

Altavista was launched in the year 1995 and became one of the most widely used search engines in the World but ended up loosing ground to Google. The site was purchased by Yahoo! in the year 2003 and they kept running it using their own search results up until 2013 when it was closed down. (More info)

AOL Search Engine in 2000

According to Search Engine Land AOL (originally known as America Online) launched it’s own branded search engine in 1997 and it was called Netfind. I would imagine that the site was much bigger in the states but the UK version of the site was still very popular over here for people performing web searches around that time. (More info)

Ask Jeeves Search Engine in 2000

Ask Jeeves is another search engine that was used a lot back in the day and I remember customers asking me if I could get their websites listed on there. The site was launched in 1996 and it is still up and running but now it is called Ask.com and it isn’t as popular as it used to be. (More info)

Dogpile Search Engine in 2000

Dogpile was first created in 1996 by Aaron Flin to provide results from multiple search engines and was a lot of peoples favourite back then. These days the site fetches the best results from Google, Yahoo, Yandex, Bing and others and you can either search the web, images, videos or news. (More info)

Excite Search Engine in 2000

Excite is a web portal that was launched in 1995 that offers a meta search engine and a variety of other content as well as a customisable homepage. According to Wikipedia it was the fourth most visited website in the year 2000 and the company is still running with web portals for many different countries. (More info)

Google Search Engine in 2000

Google was founded in September 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin and quickly became the leading search engine thanks to it’s PageRank algorithm which looked at backlinks to estimate the importance of a site. As you can see the site has always had a nice clean and uncluttered design. (More info)

Hotbot Search Engine in 2000

Hotbot was created in 1996 and originally offered search results from the Inktomi database. The search engine was a very popular site in the old days and was at one point one of the top 20 most visited sites on the web. As of 2020 the site is no longer a search engine and provides a VPN service. (More info)

Lycos Search Engine in 2000

Lycos is a search engine and web portal that was established in 1994 and according to Wikipedia it was the most visited online destination in the world in the year 1999. The company is still providing search results both in the US and in many other countries to this day as well as offering other user focussed products. (More info)

MSN Search Engine in 2000

Microsoft got into the search engine business in the year 1998 and to begin with they also provided search results from Inktomi. The site changed its name from MSN Search to Windows Live Search, then Live Search and then Bing in 2009. As of October 2018, Bing is the third most popular search engine in the World. (More info)

Yahoo Search Engine in 2000

Yahoo started out as a web directory which was launched in 1994 by Jerry Yang and David Filo. In 1995 they introduced a search function that allowed users to search through the results from their directory and it became the first really popular search engine on the internet. Since 2009 the search results have been provided by Bing and according to Alexa the site is still in the top 10 on the web. (More info)

I also wanted to include Alltheweb in this list but I couldn’t get a very good screenshot so i didn’t bother.

Which was your favourite search engine back then? Let me know in the comments.