Linux was out in 1991 ... Google was a late comer in 1998 and which for many years other search engines, both in general and perhaps more in the field I did a lot of web searching, returned much better results. Google eventually began to perform much better returning a slightly more good results iirc around 2002 and then further improving results ... also as M$ and a few other players having specialist string search engines banned from the web, (if anyone recalls M$ being upset people could search for some of their code being leaked ... ) google was the next best alternative though incredibly limited to do the same.