Google wasn't the 1st search engine, not by a long shot. Here are 25 older engines. Some of these existed before Google; others were challangers. Most of these engines are gone, but they have queries saved in the Internet Archive. Entering a keyword into one of these forms should bring up whatever Internet Archive has from that engine for that term. I'd recommend keeping queries simple, but who knows. Maybe someone searched for and saved something really complex and odd. Doesn't hurt too much to try. I'd also suggest trying multiple spellings, plural & singular forms, etc. Even if the engines could handle stemming and the like the Internet Archive can't; these are just saved searches after all.
AllTheWeb: AltaVista: BFast: Clusty/Yippie: Deja: DogPile: EuroSeek: Excite: GoTo: HotBot: InferenceFind: Lycos: MetaCrawler