Roland Perry wrote on Tue, 29 Sep 2015 at 16:00:45:
In message
-septem
ber.org, at 13:48:15 on Tue, 29 Sep 2015, Recliner
remarked:
And in those 16 years nobody bothered to Google, (or possibly Netscape it
back then)! According to Wikipedia, the film was shot at Aldwych and
Holborn.

Did Netscape ever have a search engine? I don't recall one.

I think back then Yahoo, Excite, Ask (Jeeves) or MSN would have been the
most likely candidates. In those early days, I used a search aggravation
engine

Perhaps it was very aggravating, but I expect they intended to be
aggregating.

that farmed out queries to multiple engines and combined the
results, as no single engine had comprehensive coverage of the then tiny
Web. Google was just getting started but didn't stand out back then.

Yahoo was more of a collection of human-researched links and didn't
have a search engine until 2002, MSN only started search in 1998,
didn't really settle down until 2005, and in 2009 was rebranded Bing.
Ask Jeeves wasn't until 1997 (about the same date as Google).

Before Google, people used AltaVista (1994, which evolved to a
Usenet-only search) and Lycos (1994 again).

Gopher and WAIS seem to be in decline.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_%28protocol%29
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_a...rmation_server

http://gopher.quux.org:70/Software/Gopher/servers
--
Iain Archer