Don't knock it, in the late 90s every search engine sucked in its own special way. Dogpile was great back then, and IIRC that's how I first encountered Google.
Yeah, there was a brief window in the mid-90's when Dogpile was definitely in the top 2. It replaced Metacrawler as my main search for a few months, as I recall.
Ahh you're bringing back memories. I was av.com (altavista) before google, and yahoo.com before that. It's easy to forget how much search engines sucked before google.
He is probably still using the first website he ever used to search the internet.
It's my experience that people who are not interested in the internet and computers learn just enough to get along and have no curiosity about new sites or techniques.
It's actually a rather smart strategy: Learn just enough to be functional. Be resistant to new information.
Though I think it was Yahoo or Lycos before that. Webcrawler possible.
Man ... back in the day ....
My introduction to AltaVista was when it was still a DEC project. It was a tour-de-force demo of the first 64-bit Unix (or was it VMS?), which allowed AV to load the entire search index into memory. Its claim to fame was speed, back before relevance mattered (now we're mostly back to speed).
A leftover from the era when searching was about "Do you have the page in your index? Can you find it at all?" and not "Which of these 10,000 results should I return first?"
Interestingly, a Dogpile.com search now returns Google as #1 (it's a sponsored result, though), and 4 more sponsored results I haven't heard of before giving Yahoo as the top composite result from Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
My brain just exploded.