what about ARchie, Jughead and veronica in the good old bourne shell cmd line style ??

and before 1996 (alta vista) there was lycos search too..
,

" [Yahoo] employs 50 full-time “surfers.” They browse the web looking for unmapped territory, adding their findings to the collection. "

if Yahoo which started in 1994 and about 1996 it was using such techniques. we can deduce how much search engines have progressed in 10 years only.

I used Altavista first and i remember that its results were very satisfying.

Yahoo wasn't technically a search engine, it was a directory. Yahoo Directory is still available:
http://dir.yahoo.com/

When I was an Internet noob, I remember almost buying a printed directory of the Internet. Instead I jumped on the Altavista bandwagon.

In 1993 or 1994 I saw at a bookshop an "Internet Directory" consisting of a cross-reference of names and email addresses. It was about the size of a phone book.

I was tempted to buy one, but didn't. I guess they harvested the names and email addresses from Usenet.

Then, a couple of years later I received the "best of the internet, on one CD". I think I got it for doing a book review for someone.

Someone remembers Metacrawler?! I used it a lot before Google! I was... 8 years old?

I created my first homepage, late in 1996, and I remember that I
sent a mess to yahoo in order to include my page in its list.
However at that time I used lycos as search engine, and later alltheweb, until google apeared.

Man...that screencap takes me back to searching for porn on Yahoo!

seriously.