Yep, Jeeves was really popular for a while. I was an Alta Vista fan for a while too. It was one of my favorite early searches.

What I really miss about early web searching is the cached pages where you could see all your highlighted search terms exactly where they appear on the page. Modern google dumps you at the front door to the corporate walled garden and you usually have to search again with some shitty embedded search tool. Old Google would link you to a .htm or .html page with the exact answer.