[makeset]

Between Altavista and Google, alltheweb.com (FAST Search) also had their day. I was in charge of a major web portal around 2001, and we were contracting out site search queries to FAST. One day I got a call from a new company named Google. The guy said he could give me a better price than FAST. I asked what price. He said, "Any price."

[hboon]

Little nugget:

the FAST Search guys sold alltheweb.com to yahoo.com and focused on enterprise search (i.e. they sell/license their software to companies) with customers such as newspaper companies, yellow pages companies and government agencies. They were then acquired by Microsoft a few years ago and rolled into their Sharepoint offerings.

[pge]

Dont forget northern light. It was a great search engine targeted at researchers and academics that grouped results in folders of topic areas. They made the unfortunate business decision to transition to a paid service right as google was becoming popular.

[melvinram]

lol that's great. Wonderful to think that even Larry and Sergey had to hustle. Everyone has to put in their time.