This post is a collection of 1990's internet search engines and directories (before Google). There are 13 search engines listed below chronologically by year founded. License: CC BY-SA 3.0
Archie (Sept. 1990)
"Archie is a tool for indexing FTP archives, allowing users to more easily identify specific files. It is considered the first internet search engine." (Wikipedia: Archie (search engine), 2.12.23 UTC05:43)
Gopher protocol (1991)
"A Gopher system consists of a series of hierarchical hyperlinkable menus... Similar to a file on a Web server, a file on a Gopher server can be linked to as a menu item from any other Gopher server." (Wikipedia: Gopher protocol, 1.26.23 UTC 19:59)
World Wide Web Wanderer (Jun. 1993)
"The crawler was used to generate an index called the Wandex later in 1993..." (Wikipedia: World Wide Web Wanderer, 2.23.23 UTC 04:58)
W3Catalog (Sept. 1993)
"Unlike later search engines, like Aliweb, which attempt to index the web by crawling over the accessible content of web sites, W3 Catalog exploited the fact that many high quality, manually maintained listed of web resources were already available." (Wikipedia: W3Catalog, 12.19.22 UTC 19:31)
JumpStation (Dec. 1993)
"JumpStation was the first WWW search engine that behaved, and appeared to the user, the way current web search engines do... [JumpStation] had 275,000 entries spanning 1,500 servers." (Wikipedia: JumpStation, 12.14.22 UTC 11:15)
Infoseek (Jan. 1994)
"By September 1997, Infoseek had 7.3 million visitors per month. It was the 7th most visited website that year (5th in 1996) and 10th in 1998." (Wikipedia: Infoseek, 9.6.22 UCT 02: 45)
Yahoo! (Jan. 1994)
"By 1998, Yahoo! was the most popular starting point for web users..." (Wikipedia: Yahoo!, 2.27.23 UTC 10:33)
WebCrawler (Apr. 1994)
"[WebCrawler] was the second most visited website on the internet in February 1996, but it quickly dropped below rival search engines and directories such as Yahoo!, Infoseek, Lycos, and Excite in 1997." (Wikipedia: WebCrawler, 11.7.22 UTC 21:32)
ALIWEB (May 1994)
"ALIWEB allowed users to submit the locations of index files on their sites which enabled the search engine to include webpages and add user-written page descriptions and keywords." (Wikipedia: ALIWEB, 2.16.23 UTC 08:44)
Lycos (May 1994)
"Lycos was one of the most popular websites on the internet, ranking 8th in 1997, and peaking at 4th in both 1999 and 2001." (Wikipedia: Lycos, 1.6.23 UTC 00:19)
AltaVista (Dec. 1995)
"AltaVista was the most favored search engine used by professional researchers at the 'Internet Search-Off' study in February 1998, with 45 percent of the researchers choosing it." (Wikipedia: AltaVista, 2.27.23 UTC 17:57)
Excite (Oct. 1995)
"Excite was once a popular site on the Internet during the 1990s, with the main portal site Excite.com being the sixth most visited website in 1997." (Wikipedia: Excite (web portal), 2.8.23 UTC 22: 59)
LookSmart (Oct. 1996)
"By 1999... LookSmart was the twelfth most visited website worldwide with 10 million users..." (Wikipedia: LookSmart, 7.3.22 UTC 01:50)
