I don't think so. I'm not clear on the timeline exactly, but weren't they open to the public for some time before Yahoo licensed their technology?. I know I must have found out about Google in 99 or early 2000, because I was living by Akron U at the time. When did they partner with Yahoo?

Also if I remember correctly, when you searched on Yahoo for, say, poker, you saw whatever was in their directory first, and then any further results were from whoever their provider was (I want to say it was Inktomi before Google). Am I wrong about that?

Matt,

You're right. Inktomi powered their search results before Google.

Source: http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=2162831

There's a somewhat spotty timeline here: http://www.google.com/corporate/history.html

I started using Google in the first half of 1998. When people talk about these things, I'm always shocked to learn how early to the party I appear to have been. It felt like it was already a big deal when I first saw it, maybe because it was so shocking to see that search wasn't as doomed as it had seemed to be.

I "discovered" google when a search on Yahoo that used to bring me to a certain site no longer returned on the front page. I saw "powered by google" rather than "powered by yahoo".

And before they were using Google they were using Altavista, I don't think Yahoo were using their own search results for very long. I remember switching to Google from Altavista. Mostly people changed to Google because it indexed more stuff (hence Google) not because of the better search results. The importance of better search ranking became apparent later, initially you just tended to try to come up with better search terms.

There was also Inktomi in there somewhere too. They were eventually acquired by Yahoo.

To be fair, Yahoo had a winning strategy of just licensing the search tech from other companies all the way up until Inktomi. Which is part of why it's funny they didn't buy the Google search when it was handed to them on a silver platter.

I rarely used Yahoo, but I used metacrawler. It claimed to gather results from a half dozen different engines. But it was still a fundamentally different way of using the web. When I first started using the internet, which was when I was in high school, I'd log in, go to a search engine, and just think of something to type in. I'd just go exploring, basically. I'd gather a big list of websites and visit them one at a time, generally reading each one. I was young, and absorbing information like that was easy and I enjoyed it.

As I gradually shifted from browsing aimlessly towards finding something specific, I began to appreciate Google's advantages of speed and reliability. The only time I ever tried another engine after trying Google was if I didn't find what I was looking for. That wasn't very often, and usually the other engines didn't turn up anything interesting either, so I gave up after awhile and just used Google for everything.

I remember Yahoo coming in very late, after the G had started to seriously kick their ass; maybe 2001?. I went straight from infoseek to google around 2000. Yahoo was never the engine for me.