25 Years of Internet Search Engines

the history OF SEARCH ENGINES FROM 1990 TO 2015 The search engines of today are a GPS on the information super highway. Billions of webpages are categorized, indexed, and interpreted by complex algorithms that help connect the user with the information they are looking for. The search engine algorithms must sift through all information to help pluck the best, most relevant information to guide the user to their destination. That journey began in 1990... 1990 1990 Archie ARCHIE Archie becomes the first search engine. The name is simply archive with the "V" removed. Archie was an FTP site that housed an index of downloadable directory listings. This index did nọt connect the users to websites because of limited space. Navigate Teels Pe Page: e veora pet n 1991 Searchable Gopher Index gopher://veronica.psi.net:2347/7 Please enter words to search for 1991 GOPHER 1991 The original Gopher system was released in the late spring of 1991. Gopher allowed users to distribute, search, and Turb Gopt VERONICA & JUGHEAD retrieve documents over the Inspired by the Archie search engine and comic book, Veronica and Jughead was launched. Veronica and Jughead were two new search programs that were specific to Gopher systems. Veronica could provide a keyword search in Gopher menu titles while Jughead was a tool internet. It was viewed as a potential alternative for the World Wide Web until HTTP became dominant. that could retrieve menu information from Gopher systems. 1992 1992 VL Search VLIB A Virtual Library is set up by Time Berners-Lee that comes to be known as VLib. In this early stage of the internet, CERN webserver hosted an index of of other webservers. 1993 1993 (FEB) 1993 (JUN) EXCITE WORLDWIDE WEB WANDERER The search engine Excite is launched in February, 1993 by six Stanford undergraduates. It is even- tually sold to @Home in January, 1999 for $6.5 billion. Infospace acquires Excite for $10 million after @Home filed for bankruptcy in 2001. Matthew Gray launches World Wide Web Wanderer in June, 1993. Bots would roam the internet, count active web servers, and measure the growth of the internet. Early bots would sometimes hit the same URL hundreds of times in a day, causing tremendous lag. The bots were eventually refined to the point of being able to record URLS and store the information in a directory referred to as the "Wandex". excite 1993 (DEC) PRIMITIVE WEB SEARCH Primitive Web Search offered three options. Jumpstation offered a simple linear search function that would provide information about a page's title and header. 1993 (OCT) World Wide Web Worm indexed URLS and titles. RBSE spiders utilized a ranking system but was difficult to find ALIWEB MA ALIWEB ALIWEB was released by Martijn Koster in October of 1993. This search engine would crawl and index meta-info from anything with if the person did not use the exact keywords. webpages submitted by their owners. ALIWEB ultimately flopped because they did a poor job in communicating to their users how to get their webpages submitted and indexed. 1994 E galaxy. 1994 (JAN) E|NET GALAXY 1994 (JAN) INFOSEEK E|Net Galaxy is greatly efficient, but offers too much for the early iteration of the internet. Several features simply went unused because there were not enough websites in existence to warrant them yet. Infoseek allows web masters to submit their pages in real time. In December, 1995; Infoseek is selected as the default search for internet browser Netscape. 1994 (JAN) ALTAVISTA altavista: AltaVista is the first to offer unlimited bandwidth and natural language queries. Users could add or delete their URLS infoseek within 24 hours. AltaVista provided advanced search techniques, user search tips, and features that many competitors did not. Unfortunately, they fell into obscurity when Inktomi and Google took the stage. In 2003, AltaVista was bought by Overture for a combined $140 million in assets. Yahoo bought Overture later that year. 1994 (APR) WEBCRAWLER WEBCRAWLER Webcrawler is the first crawler to index entire pages. It was so effective and popular that it was nearly impossible to use during the day time. In 1995, Webcrawler was bought by AOL. This was followed by Excite buying Webcrawler in 1997; at which time AOL begins using Excite. LIGHTNING FAST WEB SEARCH 1994 (APR) YAHOO! Yahoo! Search is developed by Jerry Yang and David Filo. The engine began as just a set of favorable web pages and kept increasing in size until they were forced to become a searchable directory. YAHOO! Each URL featured a man-made description, letting users more easily connect with the information they were interested in. All informational sites were added for free while commercial sites could pay $300 a year. Yahoo! itself outsourced their search services until 2002 and their acquisition of more directories. 1994 (JUL) LYCOS LYCOS, Lycos goes public in July, 1994 with a library of 54,000 documents. Search functions included Ranked Relevance, word proximity, and prefix matching. In under 2 years, Lycos grew from 54,000 documents to nearly 60 million; more than any other search engine at the time. Lycos was eventually purchased by Korean internet portal Daum Communications. 1995 1995 LOOKSMART LôôkSmart LookSmart aimed to compete with Yahoo! by increasing inclusion rates. LookSmart acquired the non-commercial directory Zeal for approximately $20 million in 1998. The search engine lost credibility and following when it transitioned to a Pay-Per-Click model in 2002. LookSmart was eventually dropped by Microsoft, a move that would cost them nearly 65% of its annual revenue. Where To Look For What You Need." 1996 1996 (JAN) 1996 (MAY) GOOGLE INKTOMI:HOTBOT The seeds of Google were planted in January Google! Inktomi:Hotbot launched BETA in May 1996 and was eventually bought out by Yahoo! in 2003 to the tune of $235 million. Inktomi was one of the pioneers of 1996 with the founders OTBO working on a project called BackRub. BackRub was a search engine that aggregated and counted backlinks to help determine the relevance of a particular page. of paid inclusion models but did not function as well as Overture. Pages were ranked by citation notation; meaning mentions of a website on other websites were a nod to their reliability and authority. Higher ranked sites would carry more weight in their system. 1997 1997 ASK.com Ask Jeeves Ask.com/AskJeeves is marketed and launched as a natural language search engine in April. Ask was originally powered by DirectHit, which tried to rank websites by popularity. Unfortunately, they fell victim to spam tactics that would be used to manipulate rankings with ease. Ask.com The company develops the Teoma engine which aims to organize sites by cluster of subject and popularity. Ask.com acquires Teoma to replace DirectHit. In March 2005, IAC (owner of ticketmaster.com and match.com) buys AskJeeves for nearly $2 billion; rebrands the website to Ask.com and drops Teoma for good. 1998 1998 1998 MSN Search Google Microsoft launchers MSN Search; dependent on Overture, LookSmart, and Inktomi. These three services were Google is formally launched after no one wants to buy their PageRank technology. In 1999, Google receives funding from investors and is selected as a search dropped and replaced once it became apparent that Google PageRank was a superior model. Their new search engine was previewed and launched in 2004, partner by AOL with Yahoo! following a year later. The AdWords service is launched in 2000 along with the Google Toolbar. AdSense is added in 2003 to provide targeted advertisements on websites. msn Google shortly before they dropped Yahoo! for their own proprietary technology. 2003 2003 OVERTURE SERVICES overture Overture Services is the first company to successfully offer pay-per-click search placement. The com- pany then goes on to buy out AlITheWeb and AltaVista before being acquired by Yahoo! Search Marketing for the first iteration of their pay-per-click internet services. 2006 2006 2006 SNAP WIKIA Wikia launches Wikia Search, wikia a search engine based on human curation, but Bill Gross, the owner of Overture, launches a SINAP Search Git the sarc search engine called Snap. Snap included easy views of advertisers, volumes of searches, and revenues. The search engine ultimately failed because it was just too complicated for the average web user. then shuts it down. Relevant dates: publicly proposed December 23, 2006 and January 31, 2007, private pre-alpha December 24, 2007,toolbar release August 2008, shutdown March-May 2009. Send fesdback about our nev interface. travel Searches / Search Count 2008 2008 CUIL cuil Cuil is developed and launched by former Google employees. Though relatively young, it had indexed at least 130 billion webpages in under a year. 2008 DUCKDUCKGO DuckDuckGo was founded by Gabriel Weinberg, an entrepreneur whose last venture, The Names Database, was acquired by United Online in 2006 for $10 million. Initially self-funded by Weinberg, DuckDuckGo is now advertising-supported. The search engine is written in Perl and runs on nginx, FreeBSD and Linux. DuckDuckGo DuckDuckGo is built primarily upon search APIS from various vendors. Because of this, TechCrunch characterized the service as a "hybrid" search engine. At the same time, it produces its own content pages, and thus is similar to Mahalo, Kosmix and SearchMe. 2009 2009 bing BING MSN and MSN Live are rebranded as Bing. 2010 2010 BLEKKO blekko Blekko, a search engine that uses slashtags to allow people to search in more targeted categories, launches. INFOGRAPHIC BY setupablogtoday.com How to Build A Money Making Blog In 8 hours 1I|||||