That’s rather how I feel, Mr Librarian, though you expressed it much better.

Mary, perhaps you could rent yourself out to the guys in the Googleplex to help them improve themselves!

Irene, same here, in many respects.

Not sure, woodpigeon – fairly recently in my case though I used to use http://video.google.com of course.

Aphra.

I’ve found that searching the Internet has become harder since the advent of Google — all those crappy websites created to be full of nothing but links for the express purpose of bumping up one’s “real” site in the ratings.

I actually liked Yahoo’s categorization. Sometimes I can only remember the specific name of something, and I want the category and I’d use Yahoo to tell me that (e.g. I’d know the name of a particular supermarket and want to find another supermarket, but would forget they were called supermarkets and so couldn’t search for them). Yes, that actually does happen to me.

I remember using dogpile often, and still sometimes do for a particularly difficult search. It’s funny, but Google was never the search engine that returned the best results for me. I guess I must use quirky search strings.

I have no idea when I first started using it, though, which is quite sad. I remember relying on the yahoo directory for a while at university (1997-2000) but I don’t know when I saw the light and migrated.

I don’t usually remember when exactly I was introduced to most new things for the first time. I know I rarely get excited the first time – Google was something of an exception. I tend to hear of something from the periphery of my consciousness for a while. It’s only after more and more people start talking about it that it becomes an “aha” moment.