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 untrustworthy the entire culture of email was with popups and viruses so rampant and all the while the entire process slowed down to a crawl due to the graphix requirements that we all knew were one of the ways the search engines generated money. I was delighted to see they took my suggestio to heart (just kidding) but have been a satisfied user of gmail since first signing-up.
Since that time I've checked out almost all of Google's offerings from Google Earth (which I enjoy as much as anything I use on the internet, to gmail..and even "sketchup" and lately even Google Mars, and Google Sky. And as impressed as I was already, I was totally blown away when I learned that Google's philanthropic endeavors were going to be largely channeled through Google.org, and NOT as a non-profit which would have limited the way that Google could influence and moderate the very aspects of our social order that needed help but wouldn't have been considered qualified under the government beaurocratic guidelines set-up for non-profits,and as you'd simply assume any wealthy corporation would insist on using to their advantage, and doubly delighted to find out that the person selected to be the human face of this effort was none-other than Dr. Larry Brilliant, M.D., whose work with the Seva Foundation I'd greatly admired for some time previous to this appointment.
One other thing, and maybe a little off topic, bit I wanted to express appreciation for Google Video for making me aware of the work of the later Dr. Robert Bussard who back in November of '06 gave a brown bag lunch lecture at Google's illustrius white board lunch room regarding the emergence of a new and potentially revolutionary approach to fusion power generation which has spawned some incredible interest among some very astute and independent experimental physcisists and engineers who are currently continuing Dr Bussard's research and are reporting progress of the "non-evil" variety. Thanks.

As a search professional I had used the usual suspects - AltaVista, Hotbot, Yahoo, Webcrawler,
AskJeeves, etc & even the earlier Gopher, Veronica, etc. Sometime in 1999 a mention on USENET of Google led me there. The name sounded so goofy I was not expecting much. I was immediately taken by the clean interface and after a few searches was hooked. Now it's the first of several dozen robots I check. Remember though kids - it's not the only one:

"By multiplying the means of obtaining information for, no matter how imperfect and contradictory they may be, the truth may often be sifted from them"

Baron Henri Jomini

My first time was after the University of Wisconsin integrated Google into their website. I remember having to try searching for something, analyzing the results, and refining the search over and over again until I got what I was looking for. My first search on Google returned exactly what I was looking for as the first result on the first search. I was hooked for good.

I was in high school and it was sort of a secret weapon used among us geeks when the teachers were still preaching lycos, altavista, dogpile and (eek) AllTheWeb. Google was still under the stanford.edu domain, they kept track of how many sites indexed on their main page, there were no ads and it was very fast.

Late 1999 - up until that point, if I wanted to check if our company internet access was unavailable, I'd go to the BBC website - if that didn't load, it was an internal problem. A colleague mentioned that it was much quicker to go to Google, as it loaded much more quickly than the content-rich BBC site, was as reliable and a damn fine search engine to boot.

Still use it to check whether we've got internet access, though...

I recall first turning to Google in college, probably my sophomore or junior year - placing me behind the curve and the event between the years 2000 and 2002.

I can't remember what search engine(s) I used prior, but I had heard of Google and tried it once or twice. I remember thinking at the time, "God, what a ridiculous name. Do they expect people to take them seriously? Though, adding those extra O's in the logo with additional pages of results is amusing."

The bare-bones nature of the results looked odd to me at first, but I had been told by professors it was better than other search engines (despite the name). I began to use it more, and then after a short time it was all I used.

It was either 1997 or 1998. I found a link to Google (beta) on wunderground.com. One of the Weather Underground guys had been a classmate of mine at the University of Michigan, and had since gone to Stanford. He was pretty smart, so I figured if he was linking to Google, it was worth checking out. Up until then I had preferred Altavista for searches on technical topics, and Lycos for everything else. Within a few months, if not weeks, Google had replaced them both for me.

I don't remember the first search I did. Late '97 or very earls '98 I noticed people on Usenet making references to using Google, I kinda think it was still in beta then. I had been using Altavista and Hotbot for years before because their search results were the best hands-down, and was always on the hunt for good Meta-Crawlers (today they'd probably be called "aggregators"). I gave Google a try with some searches and compared them to other search engine results, and it blew the competition out of the water with one arm tied on the back. It's been my primary search engine ever since.

I do not remember when or what I searched for. I do know that my sister, who was working for Dell Computers in their HR department at the time, said something about "just doing a google search." I didn't really know what she was talking about, but assumed it was similar to ask.com at the time. A short while after, when I needed to find something, I decided to type in google.com and was taken to the gloriously empty white page that loaded instantly. It just had that wonderful little box there. I remember thinking that the "I feel lucky" button was rather humorous.

I don't believe I've ever used another search engine since.

Leo Laporte and Kate Botello had a show on ZDTV called "The Screensavers". They taught me about the Google in 1999ish. Good times.

I was working for ZDTV as a web producer for the show The Screen Savers. Leo Laporte was in the office raving about the new search engine he'd been using called Google. I immediately typed in Googol.com and could not find the blasted thing. Eventually I had to ask Leo how to spell it.

I was a loyal user of AltaVista at the time, with occasional forays into HotBot, but was immediately impressed with the speed and accuracy of Google. Within a week I had forsaken all other search engines.

It was at my dad's house, and I was in middle school. I have no idea how I heard about it, but I vividly remember the first time I typed something into that beautiful, playful and minimalist interface, and in less than a tenth of a second a whole page of actually relevant results. I'm afraid that this has become something of a cliche, but in that moment I knew I would never search another way again.

late 90s -- i'd been the CTO of a web shop in manhattan, and we'd always spend a lot of time with new clients on the 'nav bar issue' - what was the best set of links to put in the home page navigation? (i.e. Products, Services, Information, etc)

a good nav bar would be all-inclusive, non-overlapping, descriptive, and short -- a dozens items or so, ideally. we spent a *lot* of time studying yahoo's front-page taxonomy -- the whole web, broken down into 14 top-level categories.

and then i saw google, which had no taxonomy at all. just search. there was no need to try to describe and divide the web, because it was, well, a web.

a single search box, and no categorization in sight was, for me, a profound moment.

i switched immediately, as many of us did in those days, but i didn't realize what a big deal it was until 2000. i was at a geek dinner of two dozen people, hosted by tim o'reilly, on a completely different subject (p2p networks, in fact.)

at that dinner, tim said "i know this doesn't have anything to do with the matter at hand, but out of curiosity, how many people here use google?" every hand went up, and it was at that moment that i understood that the google view of the world -- extract rather than impose organization -- was going to become ubiquitous.

I heard about it on coast to coast or similar radio show.

I first used Google in 2000 when a guy who lived on my dorm floor told me about it. (I think he learned about it from the goons on the Something Awful forums.) Before then, I was either Lycos or Yahoo user, but after using Google a few times, I was hooked -- not that it helped me much at the time. There just wasn't much in the way of online resources for English majors in 2000.

i happened to have the luck to meet larry and sergey at a digital libraries conference that was held at stanford in 1996. i worked on a related digital library project at uc santa barbara and we had regular meet ups to talk about who was doing what. this conference was held mainly in gates hall (go figure) at stanford and they gave a demo of what was then called backrub in a small office that could only hold a few people. i remember thinking that the ranking idea was so simple and made so much sense and was not pay for rank as most of the search engines at the time were. after i returned to ucsb i started using the search engine more and more. it wasn't long before their index was large enough to use it as my primary search engine.

I was working on a biography of professional wrestler, Bruiser Brody. I was always a big fan of Alta Vista. When that sort of faded, I used Yahoo. I would look up "Bruiser Brody" once a week to see if there was anything new. On a lark, I decided to try Google and found piles of unseen links.

I found Google in '98, and immediately started using it as my default & exclusive search engine.
For years I would tell anybody who cared to listen of how precise its results were. I also promised myself that when they go public, I'll invest into the first shares. But when they came up with the $85 auction deal in 2004, I didn't buy any. What an idiot!

I don't remember how I found google (or did it find me!) but I remember thinking, Where's all the stuff, this in not like yahoo. Something so bare, stripped down and fast loading could not possibly be accurate.

I was won over, however, when I got to the bottom of the search results and "Goooooooogle" stretched across the bottom of the page. I can back because of the 'o's.

I immediately looked up my own name, being a narcissistic little twit and only about fourteen years old. Then I went and made a website, so that when you Googled me, a page that was all black and violent neon green with the title "Music and Dark Stuff" was the first thing on the list.

I actually do remember the first time I used Google.

It was late 1998, at work, shortly after starting my first job after school.

I was increasingly frustrated with search engines of the time, as searching for phrases of words was virtually impossible. Say you wanted to search for the phrase "Foo Bar". The best the existing search engines could support was stuff like "Foo AND Bar" or "Foo NEAR Bar" and the results were nearly useless. One would have to dig through mountains of search results before finding any page that actually uses the phrase "Foo Bar".

I got the pointer to Google (probably from Slashdot.org), I first searched for a phrase, let's say "Foo Bar", and Google returned only results that contained the phrase "Foo Bar", and that was that. Web search became a whole lot more useful.

I remember it, but it's a bit fuzzy. I was a huge fan of Alta Vista's search in those days. I guess it was early, as it was a Stanford.edu URL. It was a clean page which I really liked. It wasn't as fast or as comprehensive as Alta Vista or Yahoo, but there was something to it. In those days it was AV and Y! for most of my searching, and Excite, Lycos and a couple of meta search engines, including the one we were working on, that did the rest of my work. That must have been in 1997. I haven't really looked back since.

Like other posters above, I also read about Google on Slashdot on August 6, 1998. Their specialized Linux search tool worked very well. You can still access it at http://google.com/linux

I was 8 or 9 and in elementary school. My dad was the first to tell me about Google. I don't remember my very first experience with it - but I do remember being in the computer lab with my classmates, and all of them were using Ask Jeeves. I felt very cool showing them how much better Google was... especially since I always hated the results I got from Ask. Nobody was too impressed, but I think it was because Google didn't have a cartoon butler on their website.

It was 1998, and I was working as the assistant to the costume designer at a big regional theatre in the US South.
The designer wanted to put one of the actors in very tall stiletto heels with flashing red lights in the soles. He had seen a pair somewhere, but not in our own city, and he didn't remember where from his travels all over the country.
I remembered that I had recently read an article in *Scientific American* about a new search engine that increased search result accuracy by taking account of hyperlink data. So I volunteered to go online and see if I could use the internet to help us find the shoes.
Of course, the article was about Google, and my first search on the site was a success. It was for "fetish shoes".

I was an AltaVista girl all throughout elementary and middle school. And then my best friend showed me a new site, Google, in like 99 (98? It was winter of 8th grade). I LOVED the fact that there were no blinky ads and random crap. And then a few weeks later, my parents came home talking about it--turns out the older brother of one of my classmates had started it.

Sometime in 1997, I believe, I noticed a robot that called itself Backrub in the agent field spidering my site. I contacted the folks behind it, and they explained their good intentions. When Backrub became Google (the next year, I think?), I pitched the New York Times, for whom I had just started writing, about an article on Google because every tech person I know had switched from gold-standard AltaVista to Google, despite Google's initially incomplete results. The Times declined my pitch, saying it seemed of marginal interest.

I've read about Google in Newsweek in 1998. I like to think that I was one of the very first Google users in Poland. ;)

I learned about google when I was in middle school. It was 1999, and I was in 7th grade (I'll be a senior in college next year). My retired engineer turned middle school science teacher told us about it. I was fascinated by the number google back then, so I thought it was pretty cool. It was also much quicker than yahoo or excite, and the websites it returned seemed much more relevant as far as I could tell in the early days of my interactions with the internet. I must note that during my formidable years, google became like a third parent for me, an important influence which I cannot deny. Without google, I'd probably be a very different person. I just wish that every once in a while google could have told me that it loved me, or tucked me into bed instead of giving me a terrible case of insomnia.

My first Google happened in Spring of 2000. I'd just sent an email to a girl with whom I'd had a brief college romance the year before. We hadn't spoken since then. She replied, and said something along the lines of "I know things didn't end well between us. Thanks for passing me an olive branch. If you want to see what I'm up to, a google of [her online name] should bring up some photos."

I'd never heard of Google at that point. I'd used Altavista for the past couple years and had been fairly happy with it. However I somehow instantly recognized the nascent verb as referring to a search engine. I typed in google.com, and searched for her user name. I was amazed at how quickly and thoroughly this new search engine located pertinent links, including the photos she mentioned. After that I started using Google exclusively, which I do more or less to this day. Google took what was then a bumbling new technology and did it right. It felt magical.

I wish I could say the same for my relationship with that girl. Aside from exchanging a few more emails we never really spoke much more or got back together. Oh well. At least I'll always have my memories, and an interesting(?) story about my first Google.

It was 1998, and I was working at web firm Clear Ink in Walnut Creek, CA. One of my cow-orkers, Adrienne Jones had taped a print out of the Google home page to her office door. We were all instant converts.

Before Google, my usual train of thought was, "AltaVista or Hotbot today?" I would alternately lean toward one or the other. I remember Hotbot had the hip edge, which was especially pronounced when AltaVista sold out. I was already actively looking for a new search engine when Google was born and it popped up in my search results one day. I flirted with Dogpile but two things about google made me abandon all others in favor of it: the lack of clutter and a good database. In retrospect, there were no ads, which I didn't realize at the time would become such a pain. Most recently they have maintained dominance by having the best database, period, but also for having just enough ad presence to make them fabulously wealthy but not enough to annoy people. All the mighty ones who cross that line have eventually fallen. And that line seems to change all the time. If Google crosses it, watch for a competing service to swoop in and take over.

If Google could only have access to everything, but in a way that kept the surfing habits of the users inaccessible to even Google themselves... now that would pretty much guarantee total market dominance forever. Not looking to see that happen though.

cheap power mac G3.

I never got one until the following year.

Probably late 1998 or early 1999. Someone at my new high school said it was a cleaner and better way to research paper topics, so I probably looked up something boring like a short biography of William Faulkner. I'd been using the usual suspects - Lycos and Altavista and Yahoo, when I didn't feel the question was important enough for a trip to the actual library - but over the course of a few weeks, as I compared the relevance of results between search engines, I started using Google more and more until it was the only one.

(Four years later, some ditz in my class got expelled for buying her history paper off a site that anyone could find with a basic search. Greater access to information doesn't just apply to you, dummy.) :P

2001. I was a senior in high school. Don't remember how I landed on the page but I was instantly obsessed. Was geeking out to all my friends about how cool it was but none of them knew wtf I was talking about. I got the nickname "Goog" as a kind of eyeroll about it.

My first google was the lyrics to "get down make love" by Nine Inch Nails.

how old were you when you first let a man make love to you?
next, who was he?
next, how did you feel at the time?
next, how did you feel afterward?
what did you feel, what did you think, were you pleased, frightened, ecstatic, disgusted?
what did he say, what words did you speak, that's what i want to know, now, tell me, now, now, all of it, now, yes! yes!
get down, make love
get down, make love
get down, make love

I was a new CS PhD student at Stanford university in the fall of 1997. The database group had organized a demo/meet-and-greet, and Larry Page was showing off "Backrub", the predecessor to the Google search engine. I did a vanity search for my own name, and some CS topic I was interested in at the time, and I was impressed that the quality of the results was clearly better than AltaVista.

When I started as an assistant librarian in 2002, my line manager showed it as "the best search engine" at the time, in order to use it to help visitors with any questions they may have had. I understand its problems but still love it.
I am using google images for reference, I have a google email account, and I use the Reader, Docs and Scholar for my studies. I think that apart from being very quick one of the best things is that it rarely disappoints you.
I go to Google for easy reference over general things, and it offers that fine. If I need more detail, I can use it to find a specialised website and do further search there.

Fall 1996. I was in grad school in US eastern time zone. Had e-mailed a high-school friend about my latest find, a clean-page version of Alta Vista -- iow an Alta Vista search page with a search field and not much else. Which was nice b/c AV had gotten very yahoo-ishly junky.

He replied, "have you tried Google?" The page looked a lot like it does now, only it said "Beta" on it.

It was via Terence McKenna's website, in 1998 or so, since he was still alive, and he said that he used Google's "I'm feeling lucky" feature as a sort of oracle, typing a question and taking the result as the answer. I found it funny, went to check this Google thing, and sure it was convincing!

It was via Terence McKenna's website, in 1998 or so, since he was still alive, and he said that he used Google's "I'm feeling lucky" feature as a sort of oracle, typing a question and taking the result as the answer. I found it funny, went to check this Google thing, and sure it was convincing!

1999, some computer lab at Texas A&M; University, working on a group senior design project.

The project was a special program the University had introduced that paired a couple of EE students with a couple of ME students to design some silicon-testing tools for 3M.

I had been using Webcrawler and Yahoo up until that point. The the other EE in my group (Kevin? don't remember his name for sure) told me to try Google. It had pretty much the same clean ad-free interface that it does now and it seemed to get more and better results than the rest, so I made it my default search.

i remember i was drunk and looking for porn

I heard about it on a networking course I was sent on for work in 1999.
My girlfriend and I had just got dial up internet and the first search search I remember was "fish euthanasia". One of our tropical fish was not responding to the antibiotics and we couldn't watch our lovely kissing gourami die. For anyone interested, the best consensus was to scoop it up in a glass and put it in the freezer.

I don't remember the date when I first used Google, but I remember reading about Google on some website. "Try this new search engine. No nonsens, just fast searches" or something to that effect.

At that time I was using different search engines and indexes for different things, but I gave it a try.

I remember that it was so fast it seemed suspicious, as though they had only indexed a fraction of what other search engines had indexed, but I bookmarked it, and kind of forgot about it for a few days.

Then I was searching for something on AltaVista, and not getting the results I was expecting. Somehow I remembered Google, but couldn't recall the name, but I found Google amongst my bookmarks.

This time my search was a little complicated, and I discovered that on Google I didn't have to put "AND" between or "+" in front of the words, when searching (something I had to do on other search engines at the time, which I found quite dumb).

And not only that, page 1 was filled with useful search results.

I've been using Google ever since.

I worked in the library at the University of New Hampshire in 1999 and a colleague saw me using MetaCrawler. He suggested I try the one he'd been using, Google. I remember asking for him to repeat the word since I'd never heard it before. I went to the Google homepage, was impressed by its design and simplicity, and have used it since.

I had been using Ask Jeeves, I was around 13 years old and had fallen for the 'clever' commercials. Then I heard about a new search engine called Google. I typed something into the box (wish I could remember) and what amazed me the most was that Google told me everything a curious mind wants to know, how many results, sorted by relevance and how long it took for the search to find the results. Clean design and kind of geeky. I was sold.

In 1999, I remember first trying Google, after being a long time, die hard AltaVista user from back when the url was digital.altavista.com.

I recall the shockingly sparse page. Even more shocking was the audacity of the "I'm Feeling Lucky" option, and that the most relevant search result was more often than not, the top result.

I was in college, taking an independent study with a physics professor (I was studying science fiction). One day, we were looking up something on the internet, and he asked if I'd seen this new search engine. "See, if you press, 'I'm feeling lucky, it takes you to the number one result," I can remember him explaining.

"Interesting," I said. "But is that really all that useful?"

I liked the name, though, so I started using it, along with DogPile, as my main search engine.

This was sometime in 1999, I think.

I stumbled upon GOOGLE by accident when it first launched. I was trolling the web for the best new search engines and it came up at the bottom of some list. I liked the name so I clicked on it. I was not impressed. How could something so simple looking be so powerful? The logo design looked like a kids game site or a search engine for kids. I did comparison searches with YAHOO and others and GOOGLE won hands down with the sheer volume of results. I was hooked and have been using it exclusively ever since.

Easy: I googled corn smut. I'm a plant biologist, and I wanted to see if Google would give me links pages about the fungal crop disease or to something less useful to me professionally. Google succeeded where Alta Vista, Excite, and Yahoo failed.

I first saw Google in prison.

I was volunteering in the secure school where inmates were allowed supervised internet access to research for assignments that they were given to complete their high school equivalency. The teacher in charge was recommending Google to them as a search engine, but it was one that I had never heard of at that time. This would have been early 1999.

I remember using Google for the first time somewhere between late 1998 and early 1999. I read about it on some news / tech site. I clearly remember the "Beta" tag and thinking "Oh boy, just what we need: another search engine." I was using Excite, Lycos, Hotbot, and Yahoo at the time. I continued to use those other services for a year or so. I remember finding results on Google once that I couldn't find on the other search engines. After that I switched.

Back in '98, I was doing support on WebTV's user-help newsgroups, using an ever-changing succession of search engines to do the legwork the user base either didn't care to do or didn't know how to do.

From Yahoo! to Lycos to AltaVista (which stayed as my number-two source for years) to Dogpile, I kept trying various engines until a fellow help-poster began recommending a simple search engine that didn't overwhelm the simple browser interface of the WebTV box and provided results in a clear, straightforward manner that anyone with an IQ over 60 could process (always a concern with the WebTV user base).

That search engine?

Ask Jeeves.

No, seriously, Google.

Searches were easy -- no Booleanisms necessary -- and generally coalesced rather nicely around just the info needed, without all the odd display formats or all the ad-related clutter or all the compartmentalization of results by corp sites and web directories and user sites and web portals and such that had befallen other engines. It had an image search when no one else did. It did shopping comparisons when no one else did. It was everything I wanted in a search engine, but nothing more.

In the fall of 1999, my parents came to visit me in Cleveland. I wanted to take them to see the Amish communities in eastern Ohio, so I dialed onto the internet, went to Google, and typed in "Ohio Amish." The very first result was for the Holmes County tourist bureau, and it had everything I needed for our trip: photos, maps, restaurants, shops, etc. I was amazed that I could get that information so quickly and easily. I have always remembered that experience as my moment of conversion to the internet age.

I think some of the people commenting here don't know the difference between Google and the Internet or something, with their claiming to have first used it in 1994.

I'd been using Hotbot and argued with a friend that Hotbot was probably better. But it wasn't and I was wrong.

I remember the cleanness - no dark font, no special logo, no advertising or nothin'. That was probably 98. Google wasn't long out.

It was whenever the first news of Google hit Slashdot. I remember it was still very much in beta so it was probably 1998. The Slashdot community was interested because it was built on Linux. I remember the plain interface was a stark contrast to Alta Vista, my primary search utility up to that time...

Sometime in 1999 it was. My favourite librarian at the university library showed it to me. She said: "Try Google. It's a brilliant new search engine." and she showed me some of the search features. I love Google. I use google for mail, calendar, IM, RSS reader, blogging, documents , maps, igoogle and probably more things that I can't think of now.

i feel google has been in my life since...forever? i cannot by the life of me remember when i first typed in that little box. the possibilities are so endless, it actually is a little scary when one stops to think about it. but then again, everything causes cancer, etc etc. so i guess it´s about choice. i choose to use google, gmail, gtalk and whatever other services the company offers. there is knol now. i´d rather have something being disrupted than life being motionless.

IT would have been 1996, when they were still google.stanford.edu. I remember the office I was working in and I'd left by 1997. There was a link on the page to email them if the service was unavailable, which I did one day and got a reply thanking me an hour or two later. The guy had gone back to his dorm for the night, read the email and had roller-bladed back to the server room to reboot the box.

My first search with 'em? No idea, sorry. Probably something about Scsi termination. But I do remember the dawning sense of 'hey, this rahnking thing works really well'.

It must have been 1999 or 2000, because I was a freshman in college, taking a found sound class to fulfill a major requirement. Our instructor, a musician, specialized in found sound compositions (tap dancing, knee slapping, teeth chatting type stuff--pretty incredible). One of our first assignments was to gather recordings of natural, interesting, unusual sounds and bring them in to share. He recommended that a great place to start would be his favorite search engine, google.com. I remember him writing it on the board as we sat in a circle on the floor. I probably still have the notebook I wrote it down in. I wish i could remember the sounds I ended up searching for. Either way, been using google ever since.

I was taking a course on scientific computing in 2002, and one of the topics was the mathematics behind search engines. The lecturer described some basic techniques to us, and had us implement them. Then he showed us Google.

That just made the accuracy and speed of Google more amazing. They present the user with a very simple interface, and let the quality of the product speak for itself. I use it exclusively to this day.

"apple pie recipe" was the first test search, and the first link was an actual take-five-apples-and-a-stick-of-butter recipe. That was in 1999.

In 1999 or so, I was searching desperately for anything I could cite as a source of information for a speech I was giving in a class. I already knew what I would say, but had no one to back me up. Yahoo failed me. Jeeves responded by suggesting that I ask a different question. Even Dogpile, my unflinching final recourse and resource, threw its (his? her?) hands up in resignation. With a wince, I (quietly, secretly) took the suggestion offered by the smarmy, self-appointed tech guru in class and gave Google a try. Google failed as well, and I got a C on my speech ("Convincing and nicely delivered, but minimally supported"). I've forgiven Google for the most part.

Contrary to many of my peers, my dad is the computer-savvy one of the two of us. He was using Yahoo (I think) and so was I. One day he told me to check out Google and I got as hooked as he was.

The first thing I Googled was my own name.

There was an article in the NY Times (the magazine, I think) in '00 or '01, where a woman wrote about how a coworker came up to her and told her "I Googled your name," and that was how she had heard of Google first. I had never heard of it myself, and had never searched my own name with other engines.

I was embarassed to find what came up with my name. I didn't think I had an internet presence at all prior to that.

I was sitting in my cube at the time, surfing the net on an SGI O2, running some Netscape version. I received an e-mail from a good friend about Google. It was the middle of the week and I had a slow day to kill. Being between classes, I decided to just do a bunch of searches and check the new toy out.

Went to the page and saw almost nothing! Compared to other search portal things of the time, this was distinctive. I thought right then and there, "this would make a great home page!" So it became one. This was an instant knee jerk reaction, largely fueled by the growing clog of ad servers everybody knew was coming.

A simple text box and two buttons, one of which was very interesting! The "I'm feeling lucky" button function was not clear, and to me that just invited a bit of play with it. And so play I did!

It soon became obvious that the button took the first hit and would deliver it. Down deep, I was disappointed secretly hoping it was somewhat random or maybe just a bit more playful than it really was.

Still, that was cool! Subtle too. I remember thinking, "why not just have the search box?" Why fuck with this feeling lucky deal? Then it hit me!

Nobody would care about just a search with a boring old box. I'm feeling lucky was a perfect gimmick! It gave a person outs. Not very many, in fact, just one out, but it was an out and the perception of that made the rest seem even more dead simple and easy than it probably was.

The whole thing was just goofy too in a playful, powerful kind of way. Anyway, it was the discussion topic --that thing to talk about when talking about the Google to others. Without that damn button, there would be very little to say!

Probably was just a joke, but I think it made a big difference. Could just be me.

Co-workers and I invented a number of getting lucky games that were fun for a week or so.

I looked over the cube wall to another co-worker and said, "this is going to be the biggest ever"

At the time, great ideas were happening, sometimes day after day, on bits of hardware cobbled together this way and that way. Google felt like that. The fact that the search mattered more than anything else at that time resonated with me then and still does today.

Liked the name too. Catchy. Google became a verb within a week!

Having suffered through recommendations like the evil PointCast, I was always happy to recommend people start using "the Google". Interestingly, a very large number of them did and stayed with it.

Nothing else has been like that. IMHO, there is a significance to how that happened that can be learned from and still employed today.

After a number of searches, it was clear the bias at Google was to Open solutions. At this time I was also discovering OSS in general and this was a welcome thing! The other engines seemed to bury or flat out ignore OSS, and that seemed like a crime at the time.

Sure it was early, but it was empowering people to build things because they wanted to, not because somebody let them, or they could afford to.

Looking back, I think the bias might have been there, but really it's probably just the huge amount of activity surrounding OSS that got the links up front and center for people. The other engines were doing all of us a disservice in that regard.

Never have really forgotten my feelings about that and the implications of it going forward had we not had the Google.

Finally, on that first day, I could see old-school Internet thinking in terms of the site utility. It loaded fast, made use of common sense and dead simple UI elements, but still had some depth for those who wanted it.

Tons of search options are available, but they are not put into buttons and such. You either know them, care about them or you don't. Perfect, IMHO.

My economics teacher brought it up when I was in year 12. I would have been 16, it must have been 1999.

She was talking about where to do research if we wanted to use the internet, and said she'd tried "a new one", that it was "quite good" and that it came from a university.

I thought the logo was childish, so I wasn't sure if I was in the right place. I remember thinking "is search all you've got?"

But most of my time on the dialup internet was spend downloading music on Napster. I could leave the system overnight and get two or three new songs. Google pages loaded faster while downloading, and that was the deal-maker.

dude, i was a webmaster at the time. it was 2002 or so; some engineer chick was like, "have you tried the new search engine"? It found everything right away. like a punk band being pure punk. it was pure search. It was pure rock. MUSABILITY.COM.

I heard ads for Google on the bay area public radio station (KQED) on the way to work sometime in the late 90s. I was mostly using AltaVista at the time. The name was memorable, and I did a search on my name. It pulled up my website, which had my name nowhere on it, as the top hit and I was very impressed. I also liked the simplicity of the page. I told my friends about it, but no one else had heard of it yet.

This was mid-98, and I was seven. I was using the internet for the first time ever. Somebody my father knew, or something to that effect, got my family using google, and my first use was to google for information on the original Digimon keychains, which were an obsession at my school. They were basically Tamagotchi that fought each other. I spent hours reading all the information I could. I'd go back every day and read the same pages, over and over.

I VIVIDLY remember my first visit to Google. Some of your whipper-snappers might not remember, but the early days on the internet (and search in particular) were absolutely out of control will banner advertising, pop-ups, etc. Yahoo and the like had main pages that made Tokyo seem rather plain. Anyway, on my first visit to Google I was blown away by the simplicity and elegance of the site. And the search algorithms were apparently better, because I could find things so quickly. I'm a loyal fan to this day.

I started using Google in 1998. I was searching for email addresses of possible contact persons in different institutions I was trying to apply to. I was not having much success with Yahoo and Altavista. I had heard about Google in an internet article and remembered the catchy name. Searched for it in Yahoo, went to the Google website and started a search. I was very surprised that the item I was looking for was on the very first entry. I tried another search and it was there again. I was so surprised I searched for everything I could think of and Google would keep giving me what I wanted in the first few entries with minimal scrolling to the bottom of the page. I have been a fan since and never bothered with any other search engine. Its so good I even sometimes use it to diagnose rare medical conditions.

It was a rainy autumn day in 2003. I had been using Yahoo! for a long time for my web searches, and just read from the newsgroups that there is a new search engine that has some artificial intelligence in it. I tried my first web search for word goatse on it. Well that did not impress me much: it just listed the same pages as Yahoo! did. I thiught what's the big fuzz, and I still do.

In '99, I was living in England doing infectious disease work. I think one of my colleagues showed it to me. S Riley maybe. I was hooked straight away. It gave infinitely better results than Yahoo at the time. I remember thinking "Isn't it obvious that I want all the words that I put in the search bar to appear in the results? Finally an engine that gets that without having to but in all kinds of boolean annoyance". Haven't really used anything else ever since. Oh yes and I liked the nerdy math reference.

The first time I remember using it was
when I was nine or ten, with my cousins.
We decided, out of sheer curiousity, to
look up, innocently enough 'naked people'
- out of pure interest. You can guess what
we found. Funny though, that's probably
what most people my age look at these
days.
I too remember Altavista. Those were the days...
internet that sometimes told you it couldn't
let you on, sex was safe *or so they tell me*,
a search engine that didn't violate your
privacy 89 times a microsecond by
*accidentally* releasing search queries -
without names of course!
Looking back, I see where it all went wrong.

1999, I was at Bucknell University. Everyone on my floor was fiddling around with all the "new" tools we had never heard of prior to college (IM, ICQ, etc). We had all been using the various search engines people have listed above (back when search engines were super cool) and someone mentioned Google. Never looked back.

I do remember that I was still a student at the Ecole normale superieure in Paris, and that Google was a stanford.edu address... 1997 may be ?

My Debate coach introduced it to our class in High School as being a much better way to search for debate evidence compared to Ask Jeeves.

I was a research assistant at the University of Iowa in 1999. My professor was just about to submit a book manuscript for publication. Her previous RAs had already done exhaustive research defining 19th-century pop cultural terms for a glossary. She asked me to replicate their research on the hope, I assume, that I might discover something new (I didn't). She mentioned this new search engine "Google," and asked me to check it, Yahoo, and AltaVista, just in case the 'net had anything for her. I realized quickly that neither Yahoo nor AltaVista returned anything half as useful as Google, and stopped using them.

97 or 98. There was article about it in the technology section of the guardian and I thought I'd try it out. I can't remember what I looked for, but I do remember that I never used another search engine.

Okay - now I realise it must have been '99. Which is funny, because I was sure I was an undergrad at the time.

Used it first in, oh, February 1999 after learning about it in the USENET group soc.culture.irish.
I was using AltaVista advanced search features with the NEAR operator before that. Took about six months for me to dump using AltaVista altogether.

First used Google when doing research for a college paper. Was recommended by reference specialist. So I'd say Loyola University Chicago's lakefront library in 1999.

Wow, that's almost 10 years ago.

I used AltaVista. I had been somewhat frustrated with AltaVista because it was hard to construct queries that got the things I wanted but I wasn't actively searching for an alternative.

At some point I heard about a search engine project at Stanford that had a public beta (not sure if they called it that). So I went and tried it. The web coverage was not as good as AltaVista but the results were often more useful.

I spent an hour or two doing side by side comparisons and found that in most cases Google was better for my purposes.

After that I used Google but went back to AltaVista for specific features (their clustering interface was sometimes useful and their query language was more powerful, though also too much work most of the time).

I first read about Google in an awesome Canadian tech/top culture magazine called Shift. It was in a list of 75 things they loved on the internet.

Great mag. I'm sad it turtled.

I was at a friend's house my Sophomore year of high school. Baldur's Gate II (a PC game) had just been released, and we were playing on the LAN. He needed to search for something, hotkey configuration I think, and he pulled up Google. After that, I tried it myself on a few things, and I've been hooked ever since.

a friend of mine told me bout to google myself
to see where ive appear online

Early 1999, I believe. Then I used mainly Altavista or Metacrawler (because Altavista was already getting full of intrusive banners, and at least Metacrawler ranked a page from the results of other engines). My advisor (master's degree then, PhD later) saw me doing a search -- I can't remember which -- and asked me «Why aren't you using Google?»
Love at first site, though I kept using the other engines for a while, less and less...
I also don't remember when I first googled myself, but I know the results were pretty accurate (my then-homepage on top, followed by links to abstracts of my early papers), and that weighed a lot for spreading the word and abandoning all other engines.

I used google service first time year 1998 end or 1999 february. Not rememebr excatly that time
school days.

When i type one word to googl search,it gived me about 11 result.

When i typed some sex word,i got too much results. About 225 or something.

But it was like miracle to me,that this kind of service is excist and it really find pages,i not know, where they location excatly is over the world. I smiled few days. Finally,i can reach other people from other country and read they news.

Here was my experience.

It was 1999. I was a freshman in high school and someone leaned over in the computer lab and said "Dude, don't use Excite, use Google. And I was like okay. And then I did. Forever.

Economics class in 1999. The teacher made the most ridiculous test I've ever taken -- It listed several economic metrics she wanted us to find on the web. She found them all, so she gave us one hour in a computer lab to find them all too. It was a game of picking the right search phrase, only it was for a grade. I was a die hard altavista user, and someone (I think it was the teacher) recommended using google, which I thought was a stupid name for a search site. I'm pretty sure I failed that assignment.

Siva,

Only for you, man. I remember the first time I heard about Google because it was the first, and only time, a Flag Officer (my boss) taught me--a snot-nosed, former programmer, self-appointed expert on computers--a trick about the internet. In 2000 I was still laboring under the impression that the web search engines that predated Google were as good as it gets. I wouldn't call them bad; they would have had to show considerable improvement to be merely bad. Excrable would scratch the surface. We tend to take Google for granted today. What we forget is that we have not always been able to type in "Billy Joel Stranger" and be able to find the lyrics 30 seconds later. Back then, we'd type that in, and get everything EXCEPT any material about the Billy Joel song. John Candy's line about "having better luck playing pick-up sticks with our butt cheeks" was just about right.

At any rate, I was working on a training presentation on the special status of medical personnel in the Geneva Conventions, and I wanted to get information about the "Angel of Mayre's Heights." (A Confederate soldier who during the battle of Federicksburg went out from the Confederate entrechments to give medical aid to Union soldiers wounded attacking the position.) I mentioned my problem with search engines, and my boss, a Brigadier General, suggested I try Google. I was amazed that when I typed in "Angel Mayre's Heights" I actual got the information I wanted, including some photos of a reenactment that I used in the presentation. To this day I use Google out of stubborn loyalty to the first search engine that actually worked, and every time I do, I think of General Swanson.

It was sometime in 1999. I received an email from an education list and looked it up. I can't remember what I looked up, but within a couple of weeks, I had organised a workshop for my colleagues at the campus I was at. The workshop page lives on in the archive.

Link to Internet Archive.

Here's one for the book that you may not have heard: Yahoo is an acronym for Yet Another Hierarchically Oriented Oracle.

My memory is of using Yahoo and the other Dewey-decimal-meets-thesaurus web pages where you worked your way down through progressively less inclusive categories until you found a list of toilet dealers or Howard the Duck fanpages or whatever.

I don't remember the first time I used Google, but I'm pretty sure I never used a hierarchically oriented oracle again.

Yahoo has managed to grow in the face of Google but its web directory wasn't the reason. With a good search mechanism, the web directories are more discriminating than Google, being edited and all, and the distinction between commercial and non-commercial sites was usually maintained, but I still never use them.

I never use Alta Vista or A9, and ask.com only occasionally. Google all the time. It's a dream come true for me. One of my early rich experiences with Google was entering the number of an announcement of a bug in an update of HP-UX (Unix) and going directly to it.

PS - The Yahoo etymology is almost entirely unknown. I only found two hits for the exact phrase in Google, and one was the spot where I first read it.

PPS - The Google bomb supposedly was killed off today, but if you Google "Miserable failure" it's still all about George W. Bush.

1998 was the date for the above.

1998 I was in 8th grade. I asked one day what was the name of the largest place value and he told me a google. bored that night I went to google.com I thought it wouldn't last cuz it was so plain looking lol

A friend of mine showed it to me in the school library. I thought, "Goooooooogle? Wierd." That was about 6 years ago.

I am a software engineer and started to use the web to find information about software problems that I were encountering, this was about 1999. A fellow engineer showed me the dogpile search engine. Now dogpile is a meta search engine. It searches using other search engines and one of the search engine that it used was called 'google'. After using dogpile for awhile, I came to the conclusion that Google was the easiest to use and started to use it for most of my searches. I especially like the Advanced search screen because it is free of advertisements and pictures, that make starting a search very fast. You just type 'google.com' and it puts you on a search screen right away while. If you enter yahoo.com, you have to find the search entry in order to start the search. I truly believe that this one screen search gave google a huge advantage over other search engines.

By the way I just used dogpile to do a search for the phrase “when did you first use Google”. Dogpile found 3 entries and Google found only 2. Does this make dogpile better? Good question.

The first time I used Google was when I was a volunteer Internet instructor at the Chevy Chase Regional Library, in Washington DC. The year was 1998 or 1999, as I recall.

I had been teaching AltaVista for search when one of the very smart reference librarians, Judith Oliver, told me she had started using Google. I needed no convincing that Google was superior to AltaVista. Judith Oliver earns her living providing the best possible answers to people who ask her questions.

I switched search engines from AltaVista to Google and never looked back. To this day I base important decisions like that on reference librarians whose judgment I respect.

In my books, reference librarians rule when it comes to search. If you haven't yet befriended the smartest reference librarian at your local library, then you don't know who your strongest information ally is.

I had heard about google in 1999 - but was a die hard alta vista advance search fan girl...I had a lot of library colleagues try to convince me to make the switch but I refused to until late 2000 - when I started working on a project which required me looking up a lot of government information online and Alta Vista wasn't returning as much data as I needed.

It was 1997 or 1998. I worked for the Stanford Libraries at the time and there was a lot of internal buzz because it was still at google.stanford.edu and we all felt some sort of association with it. I was a die-hard HotBot and AltaVista user, and for quite some time I continued to consider them better tools. I know I switched to Google by January 1999, because I have some old instructional hand-outs of mine with Google prominently listed over the others.

Phil Agre's responsible for a lot of early users, I imagine. I remember that his Red Rock Eater mailing list mentioned Google as clearly the best search engine. I switched.

I'm thinkin' 1998-ish and it was the sleekest thing I'd ever seen online. Felt like I'd been looking for it my whole short connected life. Instead of dark backgrounds and spinning GIFs, here was something smart, clean, and relevant that actually worked. Of course, that didn't last. They're more a paid directory than a search engine now. But I left Dogpile and another -- was it Northern Light? -- for the geeky insider feel of "I'm feeling Lucky".

As the ads piled up I began to look for another player and that's when I stumbled onto iGoogle. I remember that first time, too. I was re-hooked. It was like a poor man's Mac, offering gadgets I could take with me anywhere. For me, iGoogle has been more fun than my laptop (and more dependable). And just when I get one feature working for me (like the Googlicious Grand Central) their labs (or their acquisitions folk) come out with something else. And each time it's that same feeling of OMG I can't believe I get to use this for free! So I'm drooling at the features and living with the tailored ads and looking forward to the day when I can hold a Google phone in my hand. If the next step is having a chip in my head, will someone please stop me?

I first used it one day when I got pissed that AltaVista had gotten rid of their pretty Alpine mountain top picture. Google seemed simple, but other search engines actually had more features-- I still like Yahoo's basic catalog approach, where they isolate the more choice academic-minded sites.

I was sceptical about Google and hated the name, and was suspicious about their algorithm, which somehow compiled search results based upon popularity. But it worked, and hit almost everything right, even though it was a little depressing because you realized that everyone was the same and had been looking for the same stuff all the time. It somehow made me feel less special.

I registered into Dejanews in the early -90. Then it stopped to react; Google has bought it. And Deja was down from months to others before they got it up.

At that time i wrote a lot to USENET. At least my -94 - -95 writings went to bit heaven -before Google news began to work. In the beginning Google was an extension of Dejanews. And suddenly it was bigger, faster and finer than Altavista.

It takes many year before i got an invitation to the Gmail. Nowadays it is too easy to get user account names; In my opinion it was good idea to keep some quality level...

The first time I remember using Google was either in 1999 or 2000, when in school I was just surfing in Web at the same time when teacher was trying to, well, teach. First impression when I saw Google's front page (www.google.com), was that it wasn't filled with stuff like AltaVista or others of the same league. Also Google's speed was amazing, as search results were quickly loaded.

I can't remember when, exactly, I started using Google almost exclusively, but it was almost immediately after Ask Jeeves was wrecked by its owners marketing group.

For a long time, the very best search results seemed to come from the OLD Ask Jeeves. It allowed questions to be asked in natural language and generally produced very good results.

Then two things happened.

The first was that Ask Jeeves was sued for patent violations pertaining to its natural language queries. At that point, the site became less usable.

The second was that the results were now prefaced -- if not totally displaced -- by links to sponsors. So at that point the results became unusable, hidden behind gross over-marketing clutter. (I even sent an email to Ask Jeeves but was haughtily rebuffed...)

So I started looking around for a search engine that (a) produced relatively "clean" results, and (b) didn't go out of business or get transformed into a cluttered "portal" page. That search led me to Google which fuflfilled both "a" and "b".

It's interesting because even today I think Google produces way too many "echo" results which is exactly the same content from multiple sites. Ask Jeeves was once the best, but after it got broken, Google is the one I still use because it doesn't get in my way with a lot of silly distractions and clumsy advertising ala the "portal" model of some search engine pages...

It was in 2000 or 2001, and I was still in primary school. My Dad showed me it, because he was always into neat gadget-type things. From memory, he seemed to like it primarily for its speed. At the time I was too young to have used search engines much before, so I had no experience in anything else. I continued to use Google for no other reason than that it was the first one I'd come across, and it worked. A couple of years later, everyone was using it.

Last year I used GoodSearch for a month, which is built on Yahoo. It was terrible. I had to go through pages and pages to find what I wanted and it was slow. It was the pretty much the first time I'd used a search engine other than Google, and I was most unimpressed.

It was in 1999, after I had just started working at a small internet integration company. I had a team of young security engineers and one of them told me I should use it, babbling something about a better ranking system or algorhythm. I found it quick and usable though, and never looked back, although the paid results at the top annoy me a bit now.

Funny thing was, a couple of years ago I was asked by that same engineer to be a referee for his job application at Google. He was successful, and now has his dream job, and continues to think they offer a pretty good product.

It was way before it became a household name. I heard on the news about two college kids who created a new search engine called Google. It was easy to remember and as soon as I got to a computer, I used it. And the rest is blah blah blah...

1999 in my highschool library, doing research for an Art assignment. My friend was using and said "this site is so awesome".

The lack of main page advertising and general led me to believe it was some kind of grungy freeware style search engine, which had excessive appeal at the time since I was stimulus-responsing away from any company climbing ridiculously on the sharemarket...which was most of them at the time of course.

So I was enchanted by the biggest of them all.

It was likely 1999 when I was googling first time. In those days there was internet TV Quiz show for teenagers in Finland. They were allowed to use internet freely to find answers for questions. All kids where using Google in competition. I thought there must be something unusual in Google. I tried it and have used it since then...

At the end of 90's everybody I knew were using Altavista to searh the internet. In the beginning of 2000 one friend of mine was an exeption and he was using this strange websearch called Google. I thought it was too simple and I didn´t trust in it. It looked like a toy to me.

I don´t know what happened and I can´t remember when it was when I started to searh the internet mainly with Google but nowadays I use only it. Just today I read about Cuil and maybe that would be a engine to try. But it will be hard to get use to something else for websearching than Google.

My first real introduction to internet search engines was in the mid-1990s, when I was trying to teach myself the basics of nonlinear dynamics/chaos theory/fractal geometry. I quickly learned that the various search engines popular at the time (Lycos, InfoSeek, HotBot, AltaVista, etc.) had their own limitations and quirks, and I routinely would search for the same phrases and material in each and every of the search engines. I remember being happy when I first came across Google a year or two later, at first because it simply added another engine to my usual thorough searching routine. But not only was Google's interface nice and minimal, but I quickly realized that it routinely gave me a much higher percentage of relative hits than any of the other engines (InfoSeek and HotBot were my second favorites). Within a year or so of its introduction, Google had become pretty much my sole search engine.

I can't remember the first time specifically but it was in the spring, perhaps April, of 2000. There was a small tech article in Time around then that said Google was using a completely different algorithm to rank sites. Quality rather than quantity might be a really simple way to describe it. I tried it soon after and damned if they weren't on to something! Perhaps it was just a psychological thing but the best results were always right at the top for EVERY search.

My brother-in-law's wedding was soon after and everyone was either eager to tell people about Google or they were eager to hear about it. Very strange in a good way.

I had been guest lecturing at Stanford about searching, showing the CS students some of the down sides of free-text searching. ("fiber optics" v. "fibre optics"). Around that time I was chatting with the brother of one of the Google founders. He told me that his brother was working on a new search engine that would be better than anything ever seen before. I tried to argue that it would still be limited by the reality of the full-text search. I probably looked at Google when it was first made available, and I was pretty un-impressed. Just more keyword searching.

Today I use it constantly, but I'm very aware of the fact that it works quite well for nouns and proper nouns (people, companies, named things), and less well for concepts. It also greatly reflects the Internet culture, where python is a programming language, not a reptile, and ruby as a gem takes second place to ruby on rails. I think of it as a giant phone book for the Internet, not as a classification of knowledge.

I first heard about Google in my freshman year, I think, so 1999. At the time I was big into IRC with fellow technology enthusiasts so we'd often swap links and programs and Google came up one day.

Back then the school computer class had several days dedicated to learning and using various search engines like Yahoo! and Alta Vista and proper Boolean usage techniques, so Google was a surprising step away from that methodology. Just type and go!

At first I was reluctant; where were all the other links? No email/web hosting/fun stuff/news/discussion forums/directory listings? The idea of a search engine that just searched was incomprehensible. I started to use it sparingly, still hooked on my trusted sites due to having web hosting and email through them.

Somewhere in the following three months I switched over fully. I presume the test search was successful, then, but the most I can remember of it was that it was for some site or topic I was drawn to at the time. Maybe a game? Probably Zelda 64. I tried to pick something I could gauge against the competition for results to see if it really was better at finding more faster.

As an aside, I remember how excited I was to have been introduced to something so new my Computer teacher didn't know about it. I still recall telling him about Google in the winter that year, and seeing it taught/the name explained to a following class a year later. I think that might have been the fastest adoption of technology I had witnessed at the time, though it pales in comparison to the pace of things these days.

I don't remember the exact year I first used Google, but based on Google's history and my own memory, I have to guess that it was pretty early on--1998 or 1999? I know it was before I turned 13, and I remember worrying about leaving my usual search engine, Infoseek, for another program. Not only did I feel like I was cheating on the soon to be outdated Infoseek, I felt like I was cheating on my middle-school science homework, too. The results were accurate and with just the smallest tweak of my search request, the results became more and more honed. I was hooked; I never turned back.

I worried that my parents would think a new search engine was untrustworthy, so I didn't tell anyone I was using it. The search page was so empty I felt like I was hacking into some government database, and for a middle-schooler, that's a pretty cool feeling. In the end, I was the one who converted the rest of my family into Google users. I think I'd even beat my father--a network programmer--to the punch, though he might argue that point now. In the end it doesn't matter which one of us reached that sleek, refreshing and sometimes even humorous search page first. Being on top of the technology tide was a good feeling. When I realized I was actually an early Google user rather than just a trend follower, I was inspired to try to keep ahead of the game. And as Google changed and grew, so did I. I feel like we've grown up together.

Distinctly. It would have been no earlier than fall 1999, maybe sometime in 2000; I'm not sure of the year. My friend and fellow grad student Chris had been using it, and he showed it to me when we were working in the humanities grad computer lab one afternoon. I believe I was still using Yahoo in conjuction with a carefully maintained list of reference sites whose urls I had by memory, and he said "check this site out, it's better".

My first impression was that its visual design was distinctive. I wondered if it was a sort of low-rent school-project type of thing, since it had no visual bells and whistles. I thought the name was self-consciously silly and the logo was cartoony. Of course the name (and the added "o"s for search result pages) reminded me of my childhood fascination with Carl Sagan and the googolplex.

I liked that it loaded fast, but was worried about its not having a category structure. I remember we talked about the "are you feeling lucky?" button, tried it on a few sample terms and got pretty good results in most cases, though I think some imperfect matches too.

I gradually shifted my searches over to it over a few months, I think. This was well before it was mainstream, and I remember being surprised to hear (a while later though I don't remember how long) that other people had heard of this obscure but really good little site Chris had found.

I was applying for a job at a Polish startup company doing site statistics. During the job interview, I was aksed several 'tricky questions' to check how well indeed I know the strange world of the internet. It was around the year 2000. One question was - what is Google? And I happily replied, "a new search engine site that is unusual in the way that it is actually *only* a search engine". Cannot remember though, how come I knew about it.

It was September 2000. I was in a computer lab at a university just outside of Boston, MA. I'd arrived on campus a couple of weeks earlier to start a Master's with a bunch of other mostly non-Americans (I'm Australian). A classmate and I were looking something up and I immediately went to Altavista. My classmate told me that we had use this search engine that I'd never even heard of - Google. I'd spent all my life in fancy developed world school and offices and - although fairly tech savvy - had no idea. This guy had only left the mountains of Pakistan (specifically, Gilgit) for the first time only a few weeks previously.

It was the Spring of 1999, I was in Buffalo and taking an introductory GIS class at Erie Community College. My professor recommended we go into Google to find data sets. I had never heard of Google before, but it seemed like the entire class knew it, so I tried it in the middle of class and thought it was an interesting alternative to Yahoo and Excite, the two search engines I had been using.

in 1998, with the beta site. My work involves investigating recondite errors from all kinds of software. I'd been using the Copernic search engine aggregator as a workaround for the miserable performance of all the existing search engines. Google's beta performance for the searching I needed was several orders of magnitude better than anything else. I wanted to go and work for them..

I read about it on the web somewhere but don't recollect where.

My Web Guru friend (and everybody needs a Web guru as a friend these days) tells me that my first time logging into to a Google search came, probably, on his suggestion. I can't really recall when I started turning to Google search above and beyond those, then, giants of the Internet like Excite, Alta Vista, Ask Jeeves, AOL and Yahoo. "When Google?" is certainly a question I've asked myself, but, as far as my Web Guru-friend is concerned he can't recall when he began turning to it as his Web point of departure.

I was a BS student in India. I use to access internet in cybercafe in 1999.

friend suggested altavista and it looked so cool, cybercafe-india-and-1999, internet speed use to suck real bad!

so other friend of mine suggested google.com ... i tried it and it appeared a million times faster then alta-da-vista

n m not talking about search results fetching, just home page opening faster was enough for me... and i guess for a lot of ppl like me in same situation!

when i say fast i doubt GOOG had a server in india at that time, i guess no one had... it prob coz of that small html code!

I was recently out of college and working for a small IT company in Birmingham, MI. I heard about it through some industry channel, don't remember which. Anyway, I was really impressed with the site layout (and still am to this day, so glad they haven't changed the homepage much).

Anyway, after a few searches I emailed a college buddy of mine who was working for Intel and asked if he looked at it yet. He was a comp sci major and I was aerospace that just sort of fell into computers when the aero industry imploded (late 90s). So he was the more knowledgeable of the two of us. He proceeded to inform me that their algorithm was flawed and that they would be a flash in the pan.

Oh well, no one is perfect.

I was introduced to it by my (at the time) father in law. I fixed his computer for some nasty virus and to thank me, he showed me his latest discovery.

I was first amazed by the X.XXX.XXX results in 0.xx seconds.
It replaced yahoo as my search engine right away.

Many years later, a friend of mine said: "If you can't find it in google, you are asking the wrong question"

It was 2001 I think.
It was hard to find things in the Internet. It was even worse for the Brazilian web. At that time, main sites had only "directories", manually filled. Crap.

One day, my brother (who is 3 years older than me) told me: "Hey, you should use Google, it's simple, fast, and finds everything.".
I responded: "Use what???". He spelled it: G-O-O-G-L-E.

Thanks, brother!

I remember that before I use Google, I tried several search engines, like Cadê?, BOL MetaMiner and AltaVista, all of them very very slow (and I had a 56kbps connection!)
I needed to search for my sister images of Marrakesh to a college´s homework of hers, in 2001/2002 if I not wrong.
In a search over the Net, I discovered Google and I tried your image search and I was very impressed with the quickness of the results presented in the screen!
Since I recommend Google and all of your products for everybody that I know (I was one in Brazil that utilize Chrome!)
Apologizes for the poor english!
Charles Sousa - BH - Brasil