2005? There were loads of other search engines (SE), and many meta-SE: hotbot, dogpile, metacrawler, ... (IIRC), plenty more.
There was also indexes, which Yahoo, AOL (remember them!) had but there was, what was it called, dmoz?, the open web directory. When Google started, being in the right web directory gave you a boost in SERPs as it was used as a domain trust indicator, and the categories were used for keywords. Of course it got gamed hard.
Google was good, but I used it as an alt for maybe 6 months before it won over my main SE at the time. I've tried but can't remember what SE that was, Omni-something??
One of the main things Google had was all the extra operators like link: inurl:, etc., but they had Boolean logic operators too at one point I think.
I used them all and kept using the ones that gave me unique results. Google was hands down better because of pagerank and boosts to dmoz listed sites and because they scanned the whole page ignoring keywords.
There was also indexes, which Yahoo, AOL (remember them!) had but there was, what was it called, dmoz?, the open web directory. When Google started, being in the right web directory gave you a boost in SERPs as it was used as a domain trust indicator, and the categories were used for keywords. Of course it got gamed hard.
Google was good, but I used it as an alt for maybe 6 months before it won over my main SE at the time. I've tried but can't remember what SE that was, Omni-something??
One of the main things Google had was all the extra operators like link: inurl:, etc., but they had Boolean logic operators too at one point I think.