Are you kidding? I was using Altavista, IIRC, and would routinely have to page down to the second or third page to find any kind of relevant link. When I switched to Google, I almost immediately stopped looking at more than the first page of results.

There was nothing wrong with Altavista's algorithm for "finding stuff" - it was just too vulnerable to SEO pollution. I remember the quality of it declining almost overnight once spammers (yes that's what SEOs are) figured it out.

I always found the best results on InfoSeek and then they were bought out and went away there was no choice but to use Google.

It wasn't even results.

Back in the day you could be on the second page of Google search results before Excite or Altavista had even loaded.

Yahoo wasn't much faster.

I think Google's high quality search results were less due to PageRank than the fact they AND'd search terms instead of OR'ing them.

PageRank was of paramount importance back then. At the time, AltaVista/Inktomi were easy to spam, and Google wasn't.

The google spam that actually works (or at least, worked a few years ago, before panda) requires setting up lots of sites, lots of independent IP blocks. That was much harder when PageRank appeared - hosting was damn expensive, VPSes were nowhere to be found.

PageRank was a huge thing. I used "and" queries in altavista at the time. It was no match.

Initially the no. 1 reason for me was peer pressure. It was simply unacceptable to use something other than Google in tech circles at some point. It was like having an @aol.com email address.

If your users are that passionate, you're doing something right.

After I gave it a go for a while, the other reasons you list made me stay.

> It was simply unacceptable to use something other than Google in tech circles at some point.

From what I recall, it was also the most programmer-friendly search engine at the time.

http://www.bing.com/search?q=DGGEVX

http://blekko.com/ws/DGGEVX

http://duckduckgo.com/?q=DGGEVX

http://www.google.com/#q=DGGEVX

This is purely subjective, but Google is the only one that links to the Netlib 'real' LAPACK, straight to the file/documentation in question. The others have mixtures of Java packages and other examples...

Offtopic, but do you consider these results any good?

http://searchco.de/?q=DGGEVX&cs=on

Basically, but you're getting the opinion of a random person on the internet :). The third result is the 'real' one (the top two are unit tests for the named function.

That's fine, its who I am targeting!

I was more curious to see if it was even in the ballpark. The relevance i'm not too worried about if the expected response is in the top 3.

Thanks!