A Trip Down Memory Lane...Your First Search Engine Query

[jewboy]

A fun experiment, I don't know if it's been done before...

Let us gauge how long our community has been using search engines for, and if we can remember our first query.

For me it was...

Year = 1995 (high school);
Engine = Yahoo (ok, it was technically a directory back then);
Query = "Married with Children";
Level of fascination when results returned = unquantifiable!;

What was your first search engine query? What year? What engine? Can you remember that far back, to that moment in time, precisely?

I remember shortly afterwords using WebCrawler (AOL) - a true crawler based search engine. All of the sudden AltaVista, Hotbot....hooked for 11 years now!

[strategicrankings]

Impossible for to me to forget it, since 8 years later i still have what i found that day.

Year = 1997 (was working for Arthur Andersen)
Engine = Yahoo!
Query = 'windsurfing screensaver'

Level of fascination when results returned = don't remember, since i had to dig a lot to find the gem i still have today on my home and office pc.

[thejenn]

Interesting...

I'm sure my first search was in gopher...so that may not count.

First actual search at anything resembling an engine was at Yahoo! about a week after it launched. (So what, '94?) I'm fairly sure that I looked for a site that had suggestions about practical jokes for someplace I was headed that summer...

Oh yeah...and I accessed it with some text-based browser that I can't even remember the name of anymore via the Freenet system at Youngstown State University.

[NFFC]

Year = 1995
Engine = AV
Query = 'free p0rn'

Level of fascination when results returned = 11/10

[sportsguy]

Year = 1997 (was working for Arthur Andersen)
Engine = Yahoo!
Query = 'porsche 911'

Level of fascination when results returned = I was shocked at how much I still had to do to find the pic I thought I wanted...LOL. I recall thinking "If this is making things EASIER..."

I'll add to this:

Most memorable search = the first time I Googled myself and got a result...LOL

[Lyndsay]

Oooohhh... I'm new but I want to play

Year: 1994
Engine: Yahoo!
Query: Lois and Clark

And I was using a text-only ISP at the time.... oh what good times those were!!

I can't recall the circumstances... because was Yahoo! searchable in 1994? Sorry the details are a bit sketchy

[tabularasa]

my first web search was, I think, a site search on an early X-Files episode guide site..i suspect my first search of something we think of as a search engine was probably Lycos or Excite - the earliest search i remember is
"andy kaufman faked death"

It was probably Yahoo back in 1994. I was probably looking for food recipes or job-related info.