a brand-new form of public humiliation

[devi]

Late last night in the pub I was waxing nostalgic to miss_newham about talkers and BBSs and all things telnet-based, and remembering a world where that was practically all there was to the internet. When I got to college in 1994 there was one single computer connected to the Web in the whole university. There were always massive queues at it, and when you finally got to use it, you'd sit there for half an hour waiting for a little picture of an envelope to download...

Anyway, in my half-drunk and achy state I blurted out that the first thing I ever looked up on the web was (oh god) Robert Jordan. Yes, the Wheel of Time fantasy author. (Oh god the shame.) And I was wondering if other people had similar embarrassments in their past, like that first record you bought that you never want people to find out about.

What was the first thing you (consciously, deliberately) searched for on the web? Set homepages that just popped up, like your college homepage, don't count. Go on, I've owned up, now it's your turn.

Comments

[venta.livejournal.com]

Phew. I was worrying that I was going to be the only one who hadn't a clue.

I know the first search engine I used (lycos, when is was still at a .edu address), and I know I was using Lynx to read the results (which were usually 90% porn/irrelevant/both). All of which combined to convince me that you could never find what you wanted anyway.

[j4.livejournal.com]

I always used to use Altavista, and I remember discovering Google and thinking it was The Best Thing Ever -- just because it was so clean and uncluttered and easy to use. That'd've been in late 1998 or maybe early 1999... I remember being asked in an interview for a libraryish job in 1999 what search engine I used, and saying "Google", and getting a surprised-and-pleased response. (Not that I got the job, mind.) So, not quite "I liked it before it was famous" but close! 8-)

[mooism.livejournal.com]

I remember being introduced to Yahoo in, oh, 1995 probably, and wasting time looking through all the various categories they had. Medical imaging, slices through a human body, something like that.

But Yahoo wasn’t a search engine back then. The first proper search engine I used was Altavista.