[StavrosK]

Remember the search aggregators, like Magellan (maybe Columbus? Something like that) that searched X different engines and aggregated the results in a desktop app for you to use?

Then I found Google, and I never used anything else again.

[eterm]

That was Copernic. (After Copernicus) I remember using it and there was a list of perhaps 20 engines. I remember the first to return (like, would return in 1 second not 30 seconds for the rest) was google.

Every single time, google was the first back. It wasn't always ranked the top result back then, but it was fast.

[StavrosK]

Yes! That's it. Yeah, Google came and blew everything else out of the water. I remember searching for an ocx file for something that wouldn't run, and everything kept returning some spam sites. I somehow stumbled upon Google, after some recommendation, and tried it, and the first result was a legitimate download of the actual file.

It's not hard to see why everyone switched to it.

[kmfrk]

That's what Dogpile did - at one point - albeit as a regular browser search engine, which was its allure to me. I often got better results than on Google, which must have been around their formative stages.