this post was submitted on 04 May 2026
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I remember back in like 4th grade when my school was just introducing us to the internet, they told us about the big (I think 6) search engines, which, if I recall, were
Yahoo, AltaVista, hotbot, lycos, ask Jeeves, and northern light
And then they also mentioned Google, which was still pretty new and hadn't yet cemented its place in the internet yet. But they did say that Google had more results than the others, and that was all we needed to hear as kids and I think we all immediately started using Google almost exclusively.
Soooooo, the thing I don't get about your memory, unless your school year is different, is that google would have debuted when you were on summer break, and it would have been #1 by the time your next school year started. It went from unfounded, to market leader in about 10 weeks.
The same thing a year later with ebay. Early internet was a big open space, and everything was free real estate.
It's very possible that I'm misremembering, we are talking about a memory from almost 30 years ago from when I was a little kid
There's also a very real chance that I was simply taught wrong, I wouldn't exactly say that most of my elementary school teachers were particularly techy and probably not actually keeping up to date on search engines.
From what I could find though (after a quick Google search funnily enough, not really interested in doing any in-depth research) the Google domain was registered September 1997, and the company was officially founded September 1998. I don't know if google.com actually went live on either of those dates, somewhere in-between or maybe shortly after (it does seem that they were up and running by August 1998 because that's when the first Google doodle appeared) but in either case my school district usually started school in late August or early September so that timing seems like it would work out to me.
And even if it did launch at the end of the previous school year or over the summer break, summer break is only around 10-12 weeks so we would have been coming back just as Google was taking that top spot (if indeed it did do so that quickly, another search shows a lot of results saying that it didn't get that big until around 2000, again, not going to fact-check that too closely because I just don't care that much)