First Thing You Ever Searched on the Internet

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DisorientingSneeze

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What was the first thing you ever searched on the internet?

I remember in 1990-something when my dad gathered us all around the computer and said “This is the internet. We can search for anything. What should we look up?”

Silence descended upon his indifferent children while his hopeful smiling face looked from kid to kid. After a long awkward pause, I blurted out the first thing that came to mind. “Moray Eels”

The first thing I ever searched on the internet was Moray Eels. How about you?
 
I don’t remember at all!

Maybe wedding dresses?

I didn’t use the internet until my mid 20’s.

Remember those little America online disks.

My office only had one online computer. In my boss’ office.
 
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Gee… can’t remember at all.
All I remember was I signed up to hotmail.
 
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I was cutting Yew trees and fishing lobster. Ah, those were the days…
 
Pigs oink of all things,a random couple of words for no apparent reason…and that wasn’t very long ago…🤭
 
A song lyric, but I don’t remember which song…
 
You might as well ask what was the first color you ever saw? – Like I could remember that.

First thing I ever searched for on the internet was probably weather information from the Weather Underground WAIS* service.

(Unless you count searching for a high school classmate attending the other university on the DECnet**)
*
There’s some old internet f@rt jargon for you right there 👴
**
Even older 💀
 
Great idea for a thread!

I still remember my first encounter with the internet. I was a junior or senior in high school and on an academic team and we were visiting a nearby community college. We were being shown around and they showed us their computer lab with access to “the internet”.

I was mystified. They told us you could go and look up anything you wanted. So what did my brother and I do? We looked up bands. I started with the “Galactic Cowboys.” He looked up “Dream Theater.”

I tried looking up “Europe” (mostly known for The Final Countdown). But, of course, since I was new to the whole thing, and Google didn’t even exist yet, all I found were webpages about the continent. “But where’s their official band page?” 😝
 
I have no idea!!!

What I do remember was that when I did look stuff up it was kind of like looking things up in an old fashioned hard copy encyclopaedia: a lot of words, maybe an occasional black and white photograph, and no advertizing.

I do remember stumbling across the Catholic Answers website when it was first launched sometime in the late 1990s and thinking how cool that was.
 
SMHW said:
What I do remember was that when I did look stuff up it was kind of like looking things up in an old fashioned hard copy encyclopaedia: a lot of words, maybe an occasional black and white photograph, and no advertizing.
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I think that’s why childhood me blurted Moray Eels. I associated looking things up with encyclopedias and research. I could not fathom ways in which it would come to help with ordinary things in our everyday life.
 
I was working at a big financial company back in the 1990’s and the first computer was a departmental one with the green screen and white type. It printed out huge reports on that wide green-and-tan striped paper with the tiny holes on the tear-off edges that held it in place on the feeder spools.

I transferred to a new department where we sent out a lot of form letters and there were 2 or 3 cathode ray tube computers on which the employees would take turns adding names & addresses and printing the form letters. Still the small green screen and white font, I think.

I was in the Midwest and had a co-worker in Seattle who I’d talk to on the phone from time to time. She told me about this thing called eBay and she and her husband bought an antique dining room table on that website. I had a hard time wrapping my head around the idea that a person could actually do something like that.

Later on, in another job there, we each had our own computers, but no internet. Seems to me when we later got the internet, we were sternly told to never use it for personal things, but somebody knew about something called Google Maps and we all gathered around somebody’s desktop computer and were absolutely astonished that we could look up our home towns and find our houses and so forth.
 
I went to the library to look up information about the government. I encountered a porn site by accident in the process. They had no such thing as “safe search” back then.
 
I don’t remember. I would have been really young at the time. My guess is that it was something school related.

That said, I do remember using the Internet before Google. I forget exactly what I did then. I just remember hearing about Google and trying it out.
 
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Lycos and AskJeeves come to mind. I remember thinking you had to ask Jeeves in the form of a complete question. I also remember trying to ask Jeeves questions about himself.
 
For the longest time, I thought the same thing about asking complete questions. That carried over into my use of other search engines for awhile, too, before I realized it was unnecessary. 😝
 
My husband and I were both using it for job search information.

I remember that I found it fascinating that you could literally go to a newspaper’s classified section for example, and look at it on-line then. 🙂
 
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