I've been trying to remember if we ever saw any equivalent of Wikipedia or Google in use in any episode, and I'm drawing a complete blank, not surprising given the era the show was made. As I recall we were occasionally shown web sites, news stories and other files, etc. but never the means they used to find them.

Anyone remember this differently? I want to establish that the L&C dimension is NOT the world my characters come from (for a crossover with my Supergirl series), and showing them slightly bemused by the L&C world internet seems a good way to do it.

The only thing they ever referred to was the Daily Planet database or archives, but you're right the technology was too new back then so 'Googling' wouldn't be a thing unless you make it a thing. Hope that helps.

I don't recall them using a search engine on the show, but Lycos was released in 1994. (That's the first search engine I remember using.) So if anyone (cough, cough, Jimmy) were into cutting-edge technology, they may well have used a search engine, even if the state of their computers weren't more advanced than ours. And given episodes such as SL&V, I think it is safe to say that their technology was indeed ahead of our own.

Joy,
Lynn

p.s., Altavista was released in 1995, if you want them to discuss more than one search engine. It was the second one I recall ever using. (Yes, I am dating myself..)

Funny you should mention Altavista... my draft has this:

“Seriously? No Wikipedia? No Google? What the heck is Altavista?”

“I’ve seen something like this before,” said Sky, clicking on one of the pre-defined bookmarks. “I think it was called Encarta or something like that, ran off a CD, not the internet. It’s a bit primitive compared to Wikipedia but we can work with it…”

Encarta? Ah... The memories this thread is bringing back...

Yeah. If I recall way back to 1994-1995, there wasn't much to the intranet. Encyclopedias, like Encarta, were on CD-Rom, not online. I still did most of my research (I was writing Regency Fiction at the time) offline in libraries (you know, those things with lots of paper books), rather than online. I didn't really start doing much research online until I started writing L&C Fanfic. LOL. I did some shopping online, but not research. Even Lois when she's shopping at the end of S1, it's via catalog. The first version of the WWW released in 1994 was mostly used for email and not much else. Even phone books were limited online. I doubt there was much research done online until at least S4, if not beyond.

Amazon.com was established in 1994, and online by 1995, but I was a Bricks & Mortar book buyer back then (even now, I probably won't buy something online unless I know I've looked at it in my hand first, or know the author... like JK Rowling.)

EDIT: I didn't online shop at the beginning because unless you knew the company, who knew who could be stealing your credit card information. I could see Jimmy not thinking about this, but I'm sure Lois and Clark would. Clark would be especially scared of identity thieves. So, while the WWW was around in 1994-95, it took a few years before the general public trusted it enough to use it.

This is set much later, in 2016 for both worlds, so my idea is more that there are equivalents for most things, but it all looks odd to from someone from a different parallel world - for example, while there are several on-line encyclopaedias the Wiki idea never caught on, so there are various encyclopaedia services run commercially or by charities and educational foundations, but none of them have the huge range of Wikipedia, although they may actually be more accurate in what they do cover.

You could also run with the idea that there are confusing name shifts - instead of 'windows' opening, it's 'screens', instead of Google it's something like G-plex.

I used NorthernLights and Altavista with Netscape around that time. I still miss Altavista. I routinely searched and pulled up articles I read four years previously in the first three hits. Yahoo bought Altavista but Yahoo Search isn't the same. Now I have a 2 TB drive and I just save everything I might possibly want to reference...anytime...ever...

Shallowford, are you familiar with the Wayback machine? if not, check out archive.org.

Joy,
Lynn

Netscape was big at that time.