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As I recall, Altavista and Lycos tended to prove the most useful for me in the pre-Google era. Yahoo was hit or miss and Excite was middling.

I’d bet that the things being searched for influenced which engines were best for a given individual. It’s too bad there’s no way to see what each excelled at.

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I recall yahoo being good as a structured directory (i.e. browse by categories), and altavista for search.

Yahoo's directory was created by humans, too, afair, which might be one solution to the current problem. It costs a lot to create and maintain, but in a sea of gamed websites, it might be a viable solution to the problem of finding genuinely good information.

I searched for porn, programming, computer science and anything computer related in that order.

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