Which search engine was NOT a Google competitor in 1997?

Trivia 14 of 30

Which search engine was NOT a Google competitor in 1997?

MSN Search

Microsoft unveiled its own search engine, MSN Search, in 1998—one year after Google launched. At the time, it was powered by another search engine, called Inktomi, which also happened to power Yahoo! and Disney, among others (Wikipedia.org). MSN Search became Windows Live Search in 2006, which became just Live Search in 2007, and finally Bing in 2009 (Wikipedia.org).

Google

Google (the search engine) went live in September 1997, one year before Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google, the company (Engadget.com).

AltaVista

AltaVista was founded in 1995. By 1997, it had become the most popular search engine around, and was likely the best positioned to beat Google in the search engine wars (Engadget.com). AltaVista changed hands several times before finally being acquired by Yahoo in 2003. Yahoo shut the search engine down in 2013.

The word “AltaVista” is formed from the words for “high view” or “upper view” in Spanish (alta + vista); thus, it colloquially translates to “overview” (Wikipedia.org).

Ask Jeeves

Ask Jeeves was founded in 1996 and featured a well-dressed valet who was supposedly able to understand questions posed in everyday language. Ask Jeeves lasted until about 2005, when it was rebranded as Ask.com (Engadget.com).

Dogpile

Dogpile was founded in 1995 and is technically still alive today. In 2007, Dogpile partnered with the Queensland University of Technology and Pennsylvania State University to study the four most popular search engines at the time, Google, Ask.com, Yahoo, and Windows Live. The study found that only 0.6% of search results overlapped across all four of these search engines—a staggeringly low number (Engadget.com).