Internet search engines started out as a feature for desktop searches but today, they rule our lives on the computer and our mobiles. RIDZWAN A. RAHIM writes.

REMEMBER when you first started using the Internet? Which search engines did you use?

If your online adventures began some time in the 1990s, you probably began with Yahoo, which was then a directory of Websites.

I would also venture forth and say you also used AltaVista, WebCrawler, Lycos, Infoseek and Ask Jeeves.

I used something called Search Cactus because some people told me it was an exotic search engine built by Red Indian programmers in a desert.
Search engines help us sift through the mountains of information available on the Internet. Ever since we discovered their usefulness, we use them every day.

Which is why we do not realise they have become older than our children.

Google, for example, turned 10 last month and it is a late-comer to the search business. I couldn’t believe it either when I heard it.

But then I looked back and was able to remember the first time I heard the G word (Google, not G-string).

It was early 2000, and I had just started working at the now-defunct Computimes Shopper Malaysia magazine as a product reviewer.

I had been given a bunch of computer peripherals to review, and was at a loss as to how to proceed.

So I visited an egghead whom I knew from my days interning at a software company in Technology Park Malaysia, hoping that he would write the reviews for me.

Abang Man refused. Maybe writing reviews about colourful computer mice was beneath him. But what he did was to recommend a new search engine: Google.

I tried it, and it seemed to return better results for my searches than what I had used before. It seemed able to anticipate what I was looking for.

I learnt afterwards that this was due to an innovation called PageRank which ranks pages based on their usefulness. My colourful mice assignment was completed thanks to Google.

Today, Google and Yahoo along with Microsoft’s MSN Search are about the only surviving members of the search engine fraternity.

These search engines have evolved into something a lot more complex too. You can do countless things with them: e-mail, instant message, customise homepages, share documents, look at maps and satellite images, blog, translate webpages, use software and make long distance calls for free.

Google has also ventured into the phone business with its G1 phone running its own Android software.

Soon, you won’t need a home computer to find the best price for a pair of shoes or a new camera; the G1 will tell you where the best price is in the nearest shop.

Search engines are here to stay although they may not be called search engines for long now. Google, for one, has become a verb.