The History of Search

The History of Search How Finding Stuff on the Web Became a $20 Billion Business Google Search I'm Feeling Lucky February, 1994 "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web" began. 1994 YAHOO! DIRECTORY 1995 1996 April, 1994 The guide was renamed Yahoo!, an acronym for "yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle." 1997 1998 1999 February, 1999 The Yahoo! Directory offered an expedited review service called "Business Express" for a one time fee of $199 2000 -COOL-RANDOM 2001 2002 Arts & Humanities Phstarat tatan Lterata December, 2001 Yahoo! shifted to charging $299 per year for directory listings. Being in the direc- tory was a big key to getting search traffic because Yahoo! has such a large search market- share at the time. 2003 Business & Economy 2004 Computers & Internet Hate SataE Wen Ganes 2005 Education Caltas K2 DatanceLees 2006 Entertainment 2007 June, 2010 Yahoo! also created many regionalized versions of their web directory over the years, but 2008 2009 recently announced the closure of many of them, including France, Germany, Italy, and Spain. 2010 LookSmart 1994 October, 1996 LookSmart launches 1995 September, 2000 LookSmart acquired the free volunteer web directory, Zeal $20 milion. 1996 |1997 1998 April, 2002 LookSmart evolved the directory business model by having multiple ways to charge. Flat fee for inclusion and an option that charged by the click. 1999 ZEAL 2000 2001 2002 2003 LookSmart had distribution deals with syndicated their ads and results to many major web portals. 2004 2005 2006 October, 2003 LookSmart announced that MSN did not renew their deal, which expired in early 2004, and was the beginning of the end for look smart. 2007 2008 2009 2010 June, 1998 GNUhoo launched as a volunteer edited directory, as webmasters were frustrated with the slow review times at the Yahoo! Directory 1994 dmoz open directory project 1995 1996 July, 1998 Richard Stallman objected to the GNU so it became Newhoo. Yahoo! objected to the Hoo so it became the Open Directory Project. It's also called Dmoz after it's original domain, directory.mozilla.org 1997 1998 NewHoo! cool site 1999 2000 October, 1998 Acquired by Netscape, who was then acquired by AOL 2001 2002 While the ODP is a free to copy and re-distribute, and is free to get listed, getting reviewed can be incredibly slow, and stories of nepotism, bribes, and corruption are not uncommon. 2003 2004 2005 January, 2008 Rich Skrenta began another search play, building a stealth search engine named Blekko. It is currently in close beta and is 2006 2007 expected to launch later this year. One of its fun- damental differences from other search engines is that it shares ranking data with webmasters in an open fashion. 2008 2009 2010 February, 1998 Bill Gross launched GoTo, a search ad network that charged advertisers in an open auction starting at 1 cent per click. 1994 1995 .com 1996 Rather than building itself as the destination web- site, GoTo felt they could get more distribution if they did not compete directly against their ad syndication partners, who where AOL, Alta vista, MSN, and thousands of smaller affiliates. 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 October, 2001 Go To announced their first profit- able quarter and changed their name to Overture. altavista. 2002 SEARCH SOFTWARE 2003 November, 2001 Yahoo! begins syndicating Over- 2004 ture results. 2005 February, 2003 Overture bought AltaVista and AlITheWeb search engines to build an all-in-one search service. 2006 ideala 2007 2008 2009 July, 2003 Yahoo! purchased Overture for $1.6 billion. 2010 1994 The US Department of Defense paid for research into creating cheaper super-computers. 1994 1995 Inktomi 1996 Dr. Eric Brewer used this research to launch Inktomi, a search index and infrastructure com- 1996 pany. Much like Overture, Inktomi saw itself as a service to be syndicated, rather than building itself into a destination. Inktomi's results were syndicated to many top portals including Yahoo! and MSN. 1997 ARTNIENT 1998 TED STATE 1999 OF AMERIC June, 2000 Inktomi's share price slid when Yahoo! announced they were replacing it with Google technology. 2000 traffic server August 2000, Inktomi announced they were starting a flat rate paid inclusion program. 2001 September, 2001 Brett Tabke found that Inktomi accidentally allowed public access to the backend of their editorial database which highlighted search spam. 2002 2003 msn. 2004 December, 2002 Yahoo! purchased Inktomi for $235 million. 2005 February, 2004 Yahoo! launched a new search technology based on integrating pieces from Inktomi, AllTheWeb and AlstaVista, Y! 2006 2007 Yahoo! continued Inktomi's controversial paid inclusion program until January 2010. When that ended, it largely concluded the paid inclusion search business model in regular search results for general web search engines. 2008 2009 APAC HE However, the rise of vertical search may see it return. 2010 Leftovers WebCrawler launched In April of 1994, sold to AOL in June, 995, and then sold to Excite in April, 1997. In January, 1999, Excite was bought by @Home for $6.5 billion, who filed for bankruptcy in October, 2001. In November Infospace and iWon purchased Excite's assets at auction for $10 million. It's currently owned by IAC, parent com- pany of Ask 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 Lycos launched publicly on July 20th of 1994. they grew largely through the same portal strategy which killed many other search engines. In May of 2000 Terra networks signed a deal to buy Lycos for $12.5 billion in stock. 4 years later Lycos was sold to Daum for $95.4 million in cash. 1999 2000 2001 AltaVista launched on December 15th of 1995 and was the first fast searchable full web index. It 2002 was the dominant search leader before Google. but DEC & Compag neglected AltaVista as a search engine & tried to build yet another web portal - which failed miserably . In February, 2003, AltaVista was bought for $140 million by Over- ture who was bought Yahoo! five months later. 2003 2004 2005 HotBot launched in May of 1996. It was originally popular due to its association with Wired Maga- zine. Lycos acquired it in 1998 and it faded along with Lycos. WIRED OTBO 2006 2007 Ask launched in April of 1997 as a natural lan- guage search service using human editors. Over time they moved to using DirectHit and then Teoma's technology. Of the third tier search services Ask is perhaps the only one which has managed to keep 3% of the search marketshare. 2008 2009 |2010 buys Inktomi soft begins building their own search technology. After Yah Overture, Micro- Microsoft 1994 1995 July, 2004 A limited technology preview became available. 1996 1997 September, 2006 Live Search replaced MSN Search. 1998 msn. Search Web News Images Desk May, 2009 After watching their search market- share erode for years, Microsoft launched a search-only brand named Bing 1999 +Search Bder Settngs 2000 2001 July, 2009 Yahoo! signed a 10-year exclusive deal to syndicate Microsoft search results and search ads. Windows Live Search 2002 2003 July, 2010 Microsoft's program of bribing search- ers with a cashback option was closed after two years for failing to create brand loyalty. 2004 Y! Microsoft 2005 Bing's search results have the right rail ads closer to the organic search results. Google cloned this layout and saw a significant rise in search clicks. 2006 2007 Bing has focused on trying to win marketshare tough data licensing deals in areas like entertain- ment and travel. With Google owning YouTube and buying ITA Software and Metaweb, they are also pushing aggressively into vertical search. 2008 bing bing 2009 2010 1996 While Stanford graduate students, Larry Page & Sergey Brin begin work on a search project called BackRub. Their big advancement in the field of search is incorporating advanced link analysis to rank documents based on the number and Google 1994 1995 quality of inbound links. le! 1997 They rename it to Google OBETA June, 2000 Google announces partnership to power Yahoo! search's organic results. 1996 October, 2000 The first version of AdWords is launched with CPM priced ads and relevancy scores based on ad clicks. Google 1997 AdWords August, 2001 Amit Singhal helped rewrite their relevancy algorithms to make it easier to add new ranking criteria. 1998 February, 2002 AdWords gets a major revamp, with cost-per-click based ad pricing. Unlike Over- ture, Google's advertiser bid prices are not shared publicly, and they used clickthrough rates to Y! 1999 reward relevant ads. Summer, 2002, Yahoo! offered to buy Google for $3 billion. 2000 APPLIED SEMANTICS Summer, 2003 Google changed their index to allow incremental index updates, rather than doing large batch updates. 2001 March, 2003 Google launched their content tar- geted ad network. A couple weeks later they bought Applied Semantics, the creators of AdSense. admob 2002 April, 2004 Google announces discounting of content ad prices with smart pricing. |dauble click August, 2004 Google settled an IP lawsuit from (then Yahoo! owned) Overture. 2003 June, 2005 Google introduced personalized search results, which help rank sites that you visit often higher in the search results. 2004 August, 2005 Google AdWords introduced a "quality score" which further allowed them to add relevancy and other criteria to ad pricing. keyhole 2005 May, 2007 Google introduced Universal Search, which lets them integrate data from vertical data- Marc from Google bases like video, image, local, and news directly in the regular search results. 2006 2005 - 2010 Google acquires Urchin analytics, YouTube, DoubleClick, and AdMob to increase their ad inventory and own more of the internet advertising infrastructure. Urchin Deep Analytics. Dive In. 2007 October, 2009 Google launched comparison ads, a post per action lead generation program which targets big money markets like mortgages and credit cards. 2008 You Tube Q4, 2009 Google terminated 30,000 of their advertisers, roughly 5% of the total. Almost all of them were affiliates. 2009 December,2009 Google incorporated Tweets and other data sources into real-time search. The push toward real-time updating of their index was completed with the launch of their Caffeine index in June of 2010. 2010 brought to you by PPC com