There were a ton of search engines in the 90s around the same time Geocities was released. AskJeeves was probably the most popular, but there was Altavista, Lycos, Dogpile, Yahoo… Shit, Google came out in 97, which was only a few years after Geocities.
When I had my Geocities website, I used Webcrawler as my preferred search engine. Cute spider and spiderweb iso/logo. Then came Altavista (altavista.digital.com, it was at first) and I switched. It brought more and better results. Somehow I never liked Lycos. And Yahoo, the first years, was a categorised catalogue/guide, kinda curated, and you had to submit a site to be considered to be added. You had to choose under which category (and subcategory, quite often) it should be listed. Also, at first, it wasn’t Yahoo.com, it was buried in some .edu (or .ac, I don’t quite recall) URL.
