History of Search Engines
Search engines as we know have not always been as easy and straight forward to use. In fact, search engines did not even search website URL’s to begin with; they searched archived documents stored on a server. The first ’search engines’ were created by university students and professors. As colleges and universities were amongst the first people to have access to websites, this was understandable.
Archie and Veronica - 1990
These two names are amongst the most popular within the search engines’ past. Archie is commonly known as the first search engine and was created by Alan Emtage of McGill University, Montreal in 1990. After the initial wide-spread popularity of Archie, the University of Nevada developed Veronica. Veronica was initially the same as Archie but was based on searching only plain text files.
World Wide Web Wanderer - 1991
The WWW wanderer was the first Web search engine bot created. It was initially set up by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to scan the WWW to see how big it actually was. It in turn generated an index of the whole of the WWW called the Wandex.
Full-Text Searching - 1994
In 1994, full-text searching was achieved by WebCrawler and Lycos. This meant that a user could search for any given word within the whole content of a website. In previous years only the Meta data in the headers and titles of a web page could be searched.
Yahoo! - 1994
Full-text searching was making its mark and soon became known as the web standard of search engines. Many search engines came out and tried to fight for popularity. Yet, Yahoo! was soon becoming a very popular way to find what you’re looking for. Yahoo! did not use a full-text search, instead it had its own directory in which users would search. Users of Yahoo! could also just browse through the directory instead of using specific keywords to find what they are after.
Natural Language Search - 1995
The next step up from the previous breed of search engines was the natural language search. Alta Vista was the first search engine to employ this in 1995, soon to be followed by Ask Jeeves (now ask.com) in 1997. Natural language search engines allow users to type questions and queries in English. The engine then determines what the keywords out of the sentence or statement are and performs a search for it.
Google - 1997
The most popular and widely used search engine on the web today; Google was created by Sergy Bin and Larry Page who were working on a project at Stanford University. Google was the first search engine to assign websites a Pagerank. Google uses links to the website from other websites to determine the relevance of the website results in comparison to the search query.
MSN Search and DMOZ - 1998
Microsoft obviously wanted to compete with the likes of Google and brought out their own search engine. They originally listed Yahoo! search results, and then in January 2005 they switched to their own search engine model. DMOZ on the other hand is a completely, human edited web directory. Users submit URL’s to DMOZ and wait for them to hopefully be approved. This takes time as a human has to look through each request and accept or decline the website.
Future
There are new search engines coming out all the time, yet many will struggle to achieve the success of Google. There are now only 3 main competitors in the search engine business; Google, Yahoo! and MSN. Search Algorithms are changing all the time to make the web a more searchable and accessible place for everyone.
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