History of Search

The first search engine created was Archie, created in 1990 by Alan Emtage, a student at McGill University in Montreal. The original intent of the name was "archives," but Unix standards required a shorter filename.

Excite came from the project Architext, which was started in 1993 by six Stanford undergrad students. They were soon funded, and in mid 1993 released copies of their search software for use on web sites.

Brian Pinkerton of the University of Washington released the WebCrawler on April 20, 1994. It was the first crawler that indexed entire pages.

Lycos was the next major development, designed at Carnegie Mellon University in 1994.

AltaVista debut online in 1994 brought many important features to the web scene. They had nearly unlimited bandwidth (for that time), they were the first to allow natural language queries, advanced searching techniques and they allowed users to add or delete their own URL within 24 hours.

The Looksmart directory came about in 1996.

The Inktomi Corporation came about on May 20, 1996 with its search engine Hotbot. Hotwire listed this site and it became hugely popular quickly. Yahoo has since bought it.

In 1997 Ask Jeeves and Northern Light were launched.

In 1998 the last of the current search super powers, and the most powerful to date, Google, was launched. It decided to rank pages using an important concept of implied value due to inbound links. This makes the web somewhat democratic, as each off going link is a vote.

In 1998 MSN search is launched. The open directory and direct hit were also launched in 1998.

In 2003 Google released a contextual based ad program by the name of AdSense that allows people like me to make revenue of the automated placement of relevant ads on my pages.

In 2003 Overture purchased AllTheWeb and AltaVista. Yahoo gobbled up Intomi and Overture. Yahoo in 2004 dumped Google in favor of its own in house search engine. Yahoo!

There are niche specific engines, Meta engines, and in 1997 Overture (named GoTo back then) launched the pay per click variety.

Meta engines search multiple other engines at the same time. They figure that by drawing from multiple sources they refine the results to a higher quality. The problem with Meta searches is that they are usually overstuffed with advertisements. You are only as strong as your weakest link. InfoSpace powers most of the larger Meta search engines.

The newest search engine concepts are web site clustering, semantics, and having industry specific smaller search engines / portals.

© Copyright 2004-Chrystie Terry