[mcguire]

Are you kidding? I was using Altavista, IIRC, and would routinely have to page down to the second or third page to find any kind of relevant link. When I switched to Google, I almost immediately stopped looking at more than the first page of results.

[gaius]

There was nothing wrong with Altavista's algorithm for "finding stuff" - it was just too vulnerable to SEO pollution. I remember the quality of it declining almost overnight once spammers (yes that's what SEOs are) figured it out.

[gscott]

I always found the best results on InfoSeek and then they were bought out and went away there was no choice but to use Google.