Five Years of Search Engine Changes
The act of searching really hasn't changed all that much in the last fives years. Surfers still type in words and phrases in a quest to find the perfect web site to meet their needs, just like they did five years ago. Searches are still looking for the most accurate results and the least amount of spam.

What has changed is the quality of the results they now receive and the engines and directories that provide them. Alta Vista, the king of search up until 1999 was already being replaced with Inktomi as the engine of choice for portal site Yahoo! Google was just starting to be discovered by the general public and Microsoft had just launched their own search engine and portal site in beta.

The indexing abilities of search engines has improved dramatically, and index sizes have reached impressive levels. In late 1998, Google was boasting an index of about 25 million pages, compared to over 3 billion today. The quality of results has improved as well. All of the engines remaining as viable players have taken lengthy steps towards installing and improving spam filters to keep results clean and relevant.…
http://websearch.about.com/library/weekly/aa021803b.htm