The Googlization of Everything

Rather a dull story, I'm afraid, but I remember very clearly a colleague showing it to me and my thinking "it's so clean and simple, and how lovely - no advertising!"

What a chump.

Yes -- when I was in law school at UVA -- I think it was 1998 -- I found Google one day. I had been using Excite!, Alta Vista, and some meta searches regularly, and I remember thinking, after just a few Google searches, that I would be using Google from that point on.

While most search engines at that time required picking through noise -- sometimes for a few pages -- Google gave you great results up top, with a slight bias toward university-based content (or so it seemed). It was also clean and fast-loading, which was great, since I used the university dial-up. And it had a sense of humor with the "I'm feeling lucky" button.

I remember, when I graduated in 2000, toying with the idea of heading out to California and knocking on their door to see if they needed a lawyer -- in retrospect, maybe that would have been smart. :-\

I also remember giving a presentation on search engine lawsuits at my law firm in 2001, where I started by advising all the firm's clients to use Google and buy stock in it as soon as it became available.

Rarely before or since have I been quite that prescient.

It was 1999. I had lunch with a friend who mentioned it in passing. I tried it when I got back to the office, and thought that it was much simpler and cleaner than Yahoo, which I had used a ton, or AltaVista, which I had used a bit.

It was after I graduated from library school and was working as a historical image researcher for a big corporation. There was someone I needed to talk to at a major NYC museum, and I didn't have a phone number. I typed in the name of the museum and clicked the "I feel lucky" button.

Did it take me to a long list of choices? No. It took me directly to the home page of the museum. For the life of me, I can't remember how I learned about google, but I ditched dogpile pretty darn quick.

it was early 1999... i was spending lots of time in silicon valley and remember a friend doing his phd at stanford at the time telling me about it, but i didn't bother checking it out. i was happy with altavista and yahoo then, and thought, 'oh all these stanford guys get so excited about every start-up!' then one day, walking around downtown palo alto i noticed the google logo (i remember it being a little less refined then) on the second floor of a building - i could have sworn it wasn't there the month before. went home that evening, tried it out, and fell in love with the search engine's simplicity, clean and intuitive 'interface'. within a month i completely forgot about altavista and yahoo.

a few years later, that same friend sent me a much-coveted g-mail invitation. every one in s.v. wanted one, some were selling them for $100! i felt oh-so-special being one of those first gmail users, but you can't imagine how bummed i was that my first name was less than six letters! :)

It would have been 1998 (or maybe it was early '99) at the Blommers Measurement Library at the University of Iowa, while I was in library school. I overheard my boss talking to a friend about this neat new site with a "I'm Feeling Lucky" button. I was smitten from that point on.

I first used Google during my first year of college in 1999. I had always used Yahoo, but when I tested Google for the first time and after a few more speed tests I realized it was much faster and the results were much more relevant.

I was watching a game show that might have been 'To tell the Truth' and the clues were all about this grand company that has a massage parlor for it's employees and other stuff like that. The person was some Google executive and I curiously looked it up. And it was the most simple and effective search engine and the clincher was it's usefulness as a homepage.

I don't remember my first Google, but I remember my first search engine. I think it was Lycos, whose URL was given to me by a friend.
I remembered asking "but how do you find the search engine in the first place?".

It was late 1999 - early 2000. I was in high school. We had a competition at school to see who could find information on the internet the fastest. Everyone was given a computer and a quiz of obscure questions to answer; things like "Who was the prime minister of Australia in 1920?".

Most of the class used Yahoo! and the other indexes of the day. I was using Metacrawler - victory would be mine. Sure enough, I was only about half way through the quiz when a classmate claimed to have finished. No way! We gathered around his computer to find out his secret.

I was in disbelief for awhile. At first, I thought he beat me because google was lightweight and loaded quickly through our school's slow internet connection. That was certainly true; but he also claimed the results were good. We did a side-by-side comparison (most of the class watching by this stage; a true battle of the titans). Google beat metacrawler handily.

I never looked back.

I would have a hard time placing the when, but I can remember the where and how. I work in the IT department at the University of Alaska, Southeast. My boss called me into his office one day to "show me something cool." He loaded up the overly simplistic and unfamiliar Google webpage ("I'm feeling lucky?") and told me to type in a search for something.

I can't remember what we searched for, but I do remember being unimpressed. How's this any different than the current king of the hill, Altavista?

He took the mouse from me, said "Watch this," and clicked on one of the _Cached_ links. "This will be my new search engine, if for no other reason than that feature alone."

2002. UNC Charlotte orientation. They took us to the library to show us some of the options and the librarian pulled up google and said it was the best search engine. I never went back to altavista.

I grew up in Silicon Valley and always used Alta Vista. I remember that it was fairly late into my college career at NYU (probably 1999) that a roommate got me into the habit of using Google instead. I do not remember my first search, but considering I goofing off with a college roommate, it was probably not the sort of thing I should publicly announce here. I do remember thinking that it looked less professional than Alta Vista and that the name struck me as a bit too silly to take seriously (And I kept wanting to type in the correctly spelled Googol). Now, almost a decade later and I think I've said that name out loud about a dozen times today in normal conversation.

I was working for an ISP and I heard about a project at standford to do better searching and more importandly, they had a search spacific for linux. i think the url was google.standford.edu for search and google.stanford.edu/linux. results were better than the rest. never looked back.

At the time, I was an avid reader of (and occasional poster to) the Usenet newsgroup alt.religion.kibology. I remember reading a post from Kibo himself about this new search engine that was in public beta.

From Kibo's description of it, I thought at first that this was another HappyNet[TM]-type troll - he said it ranked search results in order of importance ("impossible!" I thought) and that it was called "Google". I mean, come on! Were we really supposed to believe that?

I was working at a start up in San Francisco. Word spread around the office that a couple of Stanford guys had come up with a new search engine/algorithm called Google. It had only been live a week or so. My cubemate and I thought it was interesting (two guys stuffed into one cube. How 90's is that?). I liked the clean UI. He made the comment that once it indexed enough sites it might be worth using. Talk about an understatement.

I don't remember what I first Googled, but this was back in 1999 I think, I noticed people starting to use this new search engine I hadn't heard much about on various Linux channels I frequented on IRC so I ended up trying it out, and I was impressed with the quality of the results compared to Altavista and others that I was used to using. So from then I used Google.

It was the year 2000. I was in the library at my high school, searching for funny pictures on Hot Bot.

This older kid that I looked up for his elite hacker skills suggested I try Google. He wrote it on the whiteboard, and told every one they should use Google.

I somewhere read in a German magazin about Google when it was still beta, and had used Metacrawler up to this time, which was better than any of the overloaded search sites, like Altavista or Yahoo!

But then came the above mentioned Google with the clean design and above all: the search results. They were simply superior to everything else. No noise, no apparently sponsored search result and all the other junk. Before Google I had to spend quite some time to find stuff, switching search engines, refining the search and still no success. And did I mention all this junk?

Since then only Google...

Sometime in the late Nineties. I was mostly using Yahoo and occasionally Hotbot at the time.

Didn't think much of it. It didn't have the handy human-generated "Yahoo Categories" which when the web was smaller managed to point out the best sites more effectively than an algorithm. It also seemed to be missing the advanced search options (though I think they were just buried away).

I think Google was inferior to other search engines until spammers managed to poison their results. Google's pagerank algorithm resisted early spammers much better.

I remember hating it. This was the very end of 1998, maybe beginning of 1999, and the results were hopeless.

Then the buzz started and I revisited 10 months later, and was an instant convert. The quality of the results once they got better coverage of the web was amazing. For me, it was all about finding what I wanted, not UI.

It must have been 1999; a CS teacher mentioned it and I was instantly hooked. Google produced far less noise than Hotbot or Alta Vista, and also loaded fast.

My first google was in 2002 right after I bought my first computer. I had recently been left by my husband ,while newly pregnant, and was trying to locate his whereabouts. Not my best memories. And the search mostly turned up sites where you pay to find someone.
I now use google for more fruitful and less tragic purposes.

I dont remember quite when I made the switch, but it was gradual, from using sites like Altavista and yahoo to google, it just kinda crept up on me. being only in junior high school in Australia during the 90's I mostly used Yahoo as a directory, but then someone introduced me to this google site. Back in the day it was really the only true search engine, From memory the other sites were just directories and you had to manually submit entries into their directories for people to be able to find you. Kinda like Yellow pages

The main thing that hit me first was that it was clean and simple, which to this day, is the main reason I find google to be superior to the other options. not to mention the fact that they seem to be setting the trends and pushing internet technology more so than anyone else

My first search? I have no idea, but it was probably something trivial or dirty =P

1998. A boss at my tech consultancy internship was instructing me on how to prepare research for our clients: "Use 'Google'. They have a sophisticated algorithm that finds the truth." I've, of course, used it ever since.

Google won me over immediately by finding a very hard to find thing. It was late 1999 and I was a CS student. I was trying to find a port of the mail program PINE for use on the BeOS. A very specific search, really. I tried literally every search engine and spent a lot of time searching. A friend mentioned, "Why not try Google?" I had heard of it, but had some hesitation to add ANOTHER search engine to my list. Instead of increasing the size of my list, my first search at Google essentially cut it down to only one source of information.

My story is quite boring - I worked in the web and had done for about 3 or 4 years. It was probably 1999 or so... I used Alta Vista a lot, I used to think it was amazing but the search results started getting worse (or maybe there was just more content).

Someone mentioned Google and I did a search and was instantly impressed. I think I'd looked up an obscure Australian reference and got the right match first time. The search interface was clean and simple, and they weren't trying to be a portal like all the other search engines at the time.

I was a convert from the first one or two searches...

Late fall 1998, start of doctoral studies in economics. I had been using a meta search engine that would pull the top results from a set of search engines; kept finding that the best results were from Google so just started going directly to source.

Somewhere in the late nineties i found google somewhat by accident, I used metasearchengines most of the time.
I was impressed by its clean minimalism. All the other search Provider seemed to be some kind of weird news site with an search field somewhere at the page.
The Result quality was amazingly acurate and fast. It turned out to be my favourite from this day forward.

I was in high school. The librarian was showing us around the ranks of uninteresting looking computers. After her demonstration I hung around a bit and overheard her conversing with some nerd who had a computer at home. This is what she said:

"Do you like Google or...? I like Google more than Dogpile, because it's quicker."

That's all she said.

The computers there had Google set as the home page, so I had no choice as to what I was introduced to first. But I remember deliberately looking at the "X numbers of results found in 0.13 seconds" and being VERY impressed. I searched for other things, compared their times and went off to research in books. Either that or head up to the top level and try see down girls tops as they walked around below...

my 5th grade teacher told us about it (1999), i used it to do a project on the possibility of a planet X

I first encountered Google in 1998, when I was working at a call center where we did tech support for HP's Mac printers, scanners, and more. This was the sort of place where any kind of technological fad spread rapidly, be it Everquest, Hamsterdance, or the dancing baby. One of my co-workers showed it to me and said it was created by some guys from Stanford. I remember thinking it had an odd name, but i soon discovered it produced far better results than Hotbot, and I've used it ever since.

I was in Jr. High, I'm 31 now. Google has been nothing but positive and reveling to me. If you don't like ad's use Firefox with Ad Block, then maybe you wont be so passive aggressive.

I don't remember the first time using it, exactly, but I do remember first going to University and having an initial meeting with the professor who'd be tutoring me and about 5 other pupils. This would have been 2002. He was talking about research using the Internet and the other pupils were saying "Yes I use Altavista" or whatever. I said "I use Google" and the prof looked at me and went "Yes! Google is going to be the future". Obviously the engine had been around for a few years by this point but it wasn't yet in common usage with 18 year old British students...

I think I started using it in the late 90s as well. I liked that the search box was in the middle of the page and there no ads at all. I liked that any ads on the search results pages were off to the sides. One of the biggest problems with searches at that time was getting past the "noise". Before Google I had to use 2-4 search engines to find what I was really looking for.

What kept me coming to Google was the relevancy of the first 3 search results and the "cached" page version. I recall other search engines sending me to dead links. I liked that Google gave me a past version of the page without having to use the Wayback machine.

In college. I had always used Metacrawler and clicked all the boxes (before that I think I used Alta Vista). I was in the computer lab at school one day (because I didn't have a laptop yet -- this was maybe 1998 or 1989) and I think the guy who worked there told me about it. I do remember that the first page I found using it, that didn't appear when I did the search with any other search engine, was some Situationist-like comic pages about Jacques Lacan.

you have to be in research of some form to have found it before the turn of the century

I was impressed how quickly in shortened my priority list but then came the importance of having an unbroken link to link to if need be..
that helped in the long run..

this helped in creating a minimalist ideal which is now a culture in itself

whats at the top of my priorities now..
the carbon footprint

I think I heard about it on Slashdot. It seemed like such a tiny underdog, and worth helping and publicizing to my friends and relatives. I think I may have been using Altavista mainly before.

I was using HotBot at the time Google started and I remember switching not for the superior results but for the fact Google was paying users for searches - not for clicks, for searches. So I must have been a very, very early adopter. Not early enough though to make any serious money, the scheme was cancelled before I could rake in the big bucks.

Well, i don't remember it exactly, but I remember the rough situation...

I had been using Yahoo on occasion but mostly was using Microsoft's horrible search engine when I started hearing the name Google from some of my Techie friends.

I think I started actually using it around the very turn of the century, when I decided to give it a try since I had heard so much. I never went back.

It was just so elegantly simple. And most of all I got what I wanted, and I got it fast. No bells no whistles just raw power. When Goosh.org was released I jumped on that too, as it had taken the power of Google and simplified it even more. I still however love the basic simplicity and efficiency of Google. Long may it live and reign over us.

I remember the first time I heard about Google. I was a freshman in high school, and was talking to my science teacher and another student when the topic of search engines came up. Back then there were so many. The teacher and I both used Dogpile- I don't know why she used it, but I used it because I was 13 and it was called "Dogpile." The other student said he used Google, and I remember thinking, "That's a dumb name."

When I checked Google out, I didn't trust how plain it was, so I didn't use it at first. I just didn't think something that boring-looking could be all that good. But, of course, within a year or so, that changed, and I began using it exclusively.

It was around 2000 when I started to use Google. Up to the point, I had a bookmarks folder specifically devoted to search engines. Back then when I needed to do a search for a specific content, I would input search results into a slew of search engines: AltaVista, Lycos, Excite, Yahoo, and others (my god, there were so many) and I would still not find the results I needed.

I was using Excite's now-defunct Virtual Places chat program and talking to a friend of mine about having to struggle finding Duo Maxwell wallpapers when she suggested to try Google.

I did. At first, I was suspicious of the simple and clean design. "Wait, what? Just a search box and the logo? Something is amiss!" I clicked search, saw the results, and I never looked back.

2000. One of my workmates pointed me in the direction of Raging, a new pared-down search engine from Alta Vista. This eventually led me to the inspiration for Raging, the new search engine called Google. I liked that it wasn't a heavy portal. It was just a search engine.

Before Google, internet searching was about search engines - plural. There was Altavista, Hotbot, Yahoo, Webcrawler (and others) and they all gave different results so I'd use them for different things.

Google simplified everything. We even lost the term "search engine" and starting talking about googling.

First used Google back in '94 or so at my first "real" job. Used it to google so much porn that I got fired. Thanks, Google!

I used it for my first and my last time in 1998.

At that time, I used MetaCrawler, which also popped up results from Google. Google's results were rather good at the beginning and I decided to try them out directly. I got a cookie that didn't die and that put me off enough to make me curious.

I noticed that they were secretive, evasive, obfuscating, proprietary and - most of all - nosy. And I was even then old enough not to trust anybody who needs to loudly proclaim that he isn't "evil".

I haven't used Google directly ever since, but stuck to meta engines (various, over the time). Because of that I noticed that Google increasingly turned into a search engine for spam and that the only good results came from companies it owned. Go figure.

If I do need to use Google (mostly to determine the junk-level of other engines), I turn to a proxy that respects my privacy, like Scroogle.

It would have been around 1999. I was working for a small consultancy company and up until then I'd been using Dogpile.

One of my friends sent me a link and I instantly loved it. It was just so much cleaner than any other search engine I'd used. I didn't feel like I was being sold to - it was just a useful tool.

It was a much nicer experience, and the results were better. That "I feel lucky" button radiated just the right amount of confidence in their own service.

I think since that day, I've used a search engine other than Google perhaps 10 times in total.

It was in the late nineties.

I was getting fed up with the amount of work it took to find anything on the web and feeling very gloomy about the future of the web thinking it would be a pile of crap burying anything of use.

And then I found GOOGLE! I could find anything I wanted!

And the world has never been the same since.

I heard about it somewhere on the web (I was reading slashdot religiously in those days so perhaps on there).

Within one or two searches it was clear to me that it was superior to altavista, hotbot, excite, etc. I immediately began recommending it to friends and family.

One thing to note is that for a while at least I don't think it was markedly better than alltheweb. I'm not sure which I heard of first and there was definitely a time when I flitted between the two. I think. Gah, human memory - useless!

I distinctly remember As the Apple Turns (a soap-opera themed Apple gossip proto-blog) having a little two-line blurb about this new search engine Google that had a new algorithm for deciding the relevance of pages, not just on search words but also on how recognized the page was by other pages.

The retrospectively hilarious thing was their comment that not too many people were using Google yet, so the server was still pretty fast.

I went back a couple years ago to AtAT, and couldn't find that reference that got me started.

I remember reading a small feature on Time Magazine about this small, useful website called Google. So I tried, and being used to Yahoo's interface, thought it a little boring. But I stuck with it anyway, because I liked being different.

And I was. In high school and in the computer lab, everyone around me was using Yahoo to search for Pokemon (We were young back then, please excuse us), and I was the only Googling to my heart's content. The cache feature was a revelation, it allowed me to access a site about Galileo Galilei where everyone else couldn't because it was broken.

A month later, most everyone in school caught on to Google's general brilliance. And since I was singing its praises to anyone who would listen, I like to think I had a hand in that.

It would have been 1999 or 2000 because that's when I was frequently visiting a website named Wymsey, and going to visit it one day I noticed down in the left sidebar the addition of a little Google search box. Above it, also added by the website owner, there was some text urging Google's use that gave me cause to feel this was some wonderful, visionary, humanity-hugging, braver newer world underdog struggling up from the weeds to the glorious sun and that if I was smart then I would join the forces of good and help it out by using it.

I was leery. Why would a search engine want to be my soul buddy? Why was I being made to feel Google would pick up trash off the side of the highways, plant and hand feed baby trees in the wasteland median, and sort my recycling? And if I remember correctly there was some pay thing involved, as Marc Wirbeleit mentions above, which was incentive for the website owner to urge Google's use. But he was also clearly a true believer and I trusted his recommendations.

Loathing what Alta Vista had become, and always looking for a better search engine, I gave Google a try.

It looked funny. There was that little box hanging in the top center of the page surrounded by lots of empty real estate. Feeding in my first search I felt like I was following in the steps of Alice, who had little enough introduction to the ways of Wonderland, she just knew there was a door to be gotten through or around, one way or another, and the big white page was the white rabbit and I was following it along.

Kind of.

It was a mystery. Just like when Gmail came around and was like a mystery club the way you had to know someone who was already a member in order to get in and be a privileged Gmail correspondent.

I forget what my first search was but I remember that not only was Google fast, it dug up obscure bits I'd not come across on the stew of other search engines, and that was elating. Plus Google had the "feeling lucky" button which seemed a nice humorous touch. It was a short while before I was using it exclusively though I'd found alltheweb about the same time and had liked it.

I loved Google. I was thrilled by Google.

The Google books project made me even happier, promising me all kinds of obscure bits.

I've also not infrequently railed against Google in my desk chair way, making my complaints to the computer monitor, the same reasons that others get upset with Google, but when it comes to searching I've long only Googled and it seems I keep putting more and more of my marbles in the ever-growing Google jar.

back in the early 2000s, can't remember exactly when or what i searched for, but i do remember a friend seeing that i was going to yahoo to search for something. while the page was loading i was talking about how annoying it was to have to wait for all these pop-ups and extraneous news sections to load (back then it was kind of ridiculous to use a search engine), when all i wanted to do was search the web. he turned to me and said something to the effect of, "you want google". he typed it in for me, and when google came up it was like a big breath of air. finally. whew. thank you.
In my mind google really made the internet more than a gimmick to use as a marketing tool.

I was using AltaVista as my search engine of choice, while working at a web consultancy in SoHo, NY. I think I heard of Google via hotwired.com, but it might have been another site. I remember being very impressed with the quality of their results, and showing it to a coworker, side-by-side with AltaVista.
It was still a garage project at the time, and I never expected it to displace AltaVista, much less take over the world. But my predictive abilities have never been that good.
I started using Google then and there as my first choice for searching, though, because of the quality - and I guess quite a few others felt the same way.

I remember emailing google not long after the first time I used it... the same day or within a few days.

I emailed them and said "with other search engines I was used to wading through results to find what I am looking for. After using google for a while, I 'expect' what I want to be the first result." For me, at the time, it was a complete revolution of expectation.

Google replied with "thanks".

Brock

I very clearly remember being a hardcore WebCrawler fan even when most people had switched to Yahoo!, but my first impression was "They ripped off Webcrawler's interface!"

i remember being told about this back in '99/'00 when i was in college, to use google to do searches on the library computers. i thought this site was plain and uninspiring. back then, it sure was.

i didn't really start using google until '02 because i got sick of yahoo and msn search engines. their headlines that i didn't care about and their ads.

then when i heard google was releasing google mail, i thought they were finally going to start sprouting and i wanted a part in this. i remember being able to sign up and aquire my own account and how i felt empowered knowing that others could use this service if i sent them an invite.

I guess it was around 2000 when I first used Google. All I can remember is that I had been using AllTheWeb.com previously, preferring its clean, simple layout to what was on offer from Yahoo and others. Then Google came along with the same kind of layout, but with better search results so it edged out AllTheWeb quite quickly in my life.

It must have been 1998 (or 99?). I was in grad school for computer science and was subscribed to a job mailing list run by one of the professors. Google, then in beta, was looking for employees. I had never heard of them, but their ad sounded really cool so I visited. The search quality was quite good and it was visually a nice change from the banner ad encrusted pages of altavista, yahoo, etc.

I was about the only person at work who new there was an internet. Alta Vista was my choice. I was at the University of Technology Sydney Australia library which was the only place where you could just surf back in the mid nineties. Date - unknown - had just heard about a new music format called mp3. Google came from "somewhere" - typed in mp3 and I was converted - this would be how things would happen in the future. With that type of epiphany - why didn't I buy stock? - Dufus Maximus!

around 2000 i was reading fortean times and themetioned lokking for data by googling so i had to try

Around 2000 i was reading fortean times and they mentioned looking for data on an article or stated that if you google "such", the top response is "somehting to do with aformentioned article", i soon started experimenting.

In the school. It was simple.

It was early in the Google era, my son had a project in elementary school about Beavers. I'd previously progressed in search engines from Altavista to Yahoo to Hotbot and tried a search for "Wild Beavers" in Hotbot, with the (now) expected embarrassing porn results. For some reason Hotbot didn't keep my porn rejections preferences.

Anyway setting up the porn rejection preferences again in Hotbot yielded minimal returns for the animal Beaver. So I tried Google and it returned gobs of appropriate related information and since then I've never gone elsewhere.

I don't know what my first search was, but I do remember that I discovered it in an advertisement in Disney Adventures magazine. Other search engines were muscling each other for space.. I remember one of my friends was very fond of dogpile, a lot of people used yahoo, and I was particular to one whose name I can no longer remember, but was flash-based with a graphical interface resembling a map. Once I discovered Google, however, I was sold.

I first heard about Google from Leo Laporte on Call For Help (or maybe the Screen Savers), back when G4 was still ZDTV and didn't cater to morons. He said it could one day change the way we search the web - this was in Google's really early stages - and he went on to explain all the technical reasons and what exactly made it so different. Good call, Leo!

It must have been around 10 years ago that I either read an article on Google in a German or US paper or German or US website. It sounded cool, and a few days later I compared search results of Yahoo with Google. That got me sold I've never switched back.
I came to Yahoo from AltaVista a few years before that. I never had any problems with any of these, the speeds were always good for me. I've had an ISDN internet connection that I paid for with my own money as a 15 year old (they billed by the minute then!).
I think there were a few other search engines that I used for a few weeks each, but I cannot remember what they were.

in the university. a friend of mine said: what is your complete name? and i said to him and he showed me the results. i thought it was wonderfull and spent some hours after that looking for my friends...

While I don't remember the exact query I used, i do remember the first time I used Google. It was at work, in 2000 or 2001? I had been doing searches via yahoo or netscape up until that point, but I noticed a lot of the programmers had Google as their homepages. So one day as someone asked me to look up something, he just said "google it". I caught on right away and then made it my homepage too. That day I became one with the rest.

Party at my house. Half of the folks there were of "Sesame Street" age -- I referenced Big Bird's "Alphabet Song" and got blank stares from the other half.

Figured I'd try this new search engine to see if it was any good. I typed "Big Bird's Alphabet Song" and hit [I'm Feeling Lucky]. The page that came up had the song as a .wav file built into its background-sound -so- within seconds, the song was ringing through the speakers in the room.

Mouth agape -- we all became convinced that Google was actually some kind of stealthy A.I. laying low and scouring keywords to learn more about the human condition.

I'm still not entirely convinced this is not the case.

Was trying to find a datasheet for a motorola 6809 processor back around 1999-2000. My usual search engines at the time (dogpile, altavista, hotbot, and several others others) couldn't find one. Finally found this "new" search engine, figured it may be worth a try. Typed in "6809 datasheet", pressed the aptly named "I'm feeling lucky" button, and lo and behold the correct datasheet popped up. Used it every day since.

My sorority was trying to raise money through Campusfundraiser.com and our task was to advertise Google on campus. At the time, Google had just started and people had barely begun to take notice. Frankly, I felt the name was a bit silly and I remember acting insincere as we handed out Google t-shirts, mousepads, hats, pens, etc to fellow students...I thought that this company really had no chance against Yahoo! Boy was I proven wrong...

I first heard about Google on Slashdot on August 6, 1998, back when it was at google.stanford.edu. They had a dedicated Linux site search function (as they still do today), which was fantastically useful. I found a significant HTML bug on the home page, despite it being so brief. I e-mailed Sergey Brin, who wrote me back thanking me, telling me that he'd fixed the bug. A short time later they sent out their first "Google Friends" newsletter, which I was pleased to be included on. Google was human. There were people there who cared about the results, and who wanted it to be liked, not to make money on advertising, but for the challenge of it. That made all the difference.

It's difficult to properly emphasize how truly terrible that search engines were in 1998. AltaVista and HotBot were as good as it got, and that's saying very little. Results were basically sorted randomly. Choosing a search engine was really based on faith more than anything else, because Lord knows there was very little hard evidence that any one was better than any other. That had been the situation for long enough that we'd lost all concept that things could be better. The human-indexed web seemed to be the future of things: Yahoo and the Open Directory Project (then called "Gnuhoo," then "NewHoo," then ODP) would have to replace search engines. And then along came Google. What a tall drink of water Google was.

i am pretty sure it was around 1999, maybe early 2000. i had been hearing a lot of hype about how amazing it was. and to be honest i hated it. i had no idea where my headlines were, or tech stories. but once i actaully needed to search for something, and yahoo and alta-vista were giving me nothing, i fell in love with google.

I started using Google in high school. It was right after our school got it's first couple of computers... I'd say around '99. I had been using the search engine, Dogpile (I don't even know if it's still in existence.). Dogpile would search through a bunch of different search engines, and at the time, I thought that was really cool. After about a week, I realized that the results from Google were the ones I used almost exclusively, so I switched to Google, and have been a Google loyalist ever since. I was even one of those kids (I guess I'm not much more than a kid now, but it seems like Gmail has been around forever.) that trolled the 'net looking for someone to give me an invite when Gmail went beta.

The first time I used Google was in college. My professor for Russian Lit suggested we use it for one the papers we had to write. I remember showing it to everyone after that and then started becoming a regular user. At the time everyone, including me, was using Yahoo.

I was at the 2000 Webby Awards in San Fran and Google won the tech category. The entire team went on stage in roller skates. I had used Google a few times prior to that but the roller skates cinched the deal.

I don't remember the year or the exact moment. But I do remember somebody mentioning it, so I tried it. And I thought, "Jeez, Yahoo's done me so well, why does somebody need to create a new one?" And now my husband calls me Google Queen. I am strong with the Google-Fu.

I don't remember my first Google but I remember the atmosphere. I was researching something, probably something for work, which at the time was advertising, and I was runnin searches through several search engines - Yahoo!, AltaVista, Ask Jeevrs, etc. After a while, I thought, "I hate the clutter on all of these. The only one that's succinct and gives me just what I need is this Google. I'm sticking to Google from now on."

I was using AltaVista and thought that was pretty cool for unusual searches, but still used Yahoo for more common terms as AltaVista would return too many hits. I don't remember where, but I read about a new search engine developed at a university and how it used page ranking. As soon as I used it I started telling people to ditch other search tools as this was so much better.

It was 2001, and I was in the sixth grade "learning" how to use a computer at Delaware Valley Middle School. Groups in my class were assigned to use different search engines and compare the results and share what information we got. I forget the topic, exactly, but consensus in the class was that Google was the superior product.

I heard about Google in 2004 when I was 14 right after our family had our very first ADSL connection installed in the house,I was on a webpage that generated search results from many major search engines,and Google was of course one of them,and I clearly remember my dad used to call it "Gogo",actually he was the one that told me for the first time the letter G there stands for "Gogo".Sorry I didn't remember what I first googled about.

I honestly don't remember the first time I used Google because at the time I thought of it as just one in a long string of available search engines: Alta Vista, HotBot, Ask Jeeves, Yahoo, etc. Compared to most people I knew, I came pretty late to the online world (I didn't get my first email address until probably 2000) and for whatever reason settled on Yahoo as my default search engine. Then one day a friend was looking over my shoulder as we were looking something up and he was genuinely shocked to see me head to Yahoo. "Why not just use Google?" he asked, dumbfounded. Not wanting to look a moron, I tried to recover with something clever like, "Oh yeah, that's where I meant to go." I headed over to Google and never looked back. Little did I realize how often that question, "Why not just use Google?" would come to resonate with me now that a day barely goes by where I don't open my iGoogle home page, check my gmail account, look something up on Google Maps and play around on Google Earth.

It was 1999, a high school friend and I were hanging out and somehow search engines came up. Which, because we were cool like that, wasn't an unusual kind of topic. Anyways, he told me about El Goog, and off I went to the search Mecca that it is.

Quite a while ago, maybe ten or eleven years, my youngest kid who was/is a computer engineer,programmer,geek, but who now is in his mid thirties told me about Google as an alternative to the search engines then commonly used---I think AltaVista may have been my choice back then. I tried Google and between the silly sounding name and the clever use of o's in stringing out the search results, I said ..."this is way to cutesy to last."

Well, what do I know anyway.

My friend told me that if you typed Dumb Motherf***er into google it took you to George Bush's website, which I'm sure was when he had just got in. I think I'd used it a tiny bit before then but that was the first time it really came into my consciousness.

My first google was sometime in the autum in 1997 while living in San Francisco, and was brought to my attention first as a result of my reading about it in one of the tech articles in the San Francisco Chronicle (or Examiner, more likely since I preferred it as it always ran the Zippy the Pinhead comic). It caught my eye and imagination since I've long been interested in mathmatics concepts and saw that the word Google was a play on the famous mathmatician's name (and their concept) of a Googol and Googolplex. Later that day I heard about the search engine itself on some radio tech program on KQED where they were discussing what was hot in new ventures on the internet and commented on how some folks down at Stanford and over at Berkeley..and everywhere..were excited about Google, a bare bones search engine that was all about keeping the screen clean and response fast and relevant. I checked it out and within an instant was sold. They had done what none of the other search engines had done: eliminated the visual whirlwind and comcommitant pop-ups and grafix overload which seemed to accompany any well-used site back then and which burdened the process to an almost debilitating degree.
I will confess to also using other search engines like Metacrawler and altavista but really after my first use of Google I was pretty much exclusive and shortly thereafter wrote them a nice letter complimenting their company's tact and approach and told them right then and their that what the future of the internet needed was a free email program run with the same kind of perspective as anyown back then knew how totally untrustwor