A Brief History of Search Engines

by: Jim Grayson
Total views: 282
Word Count: 373

Search engines are a staple of daily life. Almost since the inception of the beast which we know today as the internet, there has been some sort of device to sift through it. This is especially true today, where dozens of providers battle for our custom to let them sort through millions of pages just so we can see yesterday's football results, but what about the history of search engines? They had to starts somewhere, so who was first, and how effective were these early incarnations?

Before the public use search engines that we know today existed there was only a list of all web servers - ‘a computer program that is responsible for accepting HTTP requests from clients (user agents such as web browsers), and serving them HTTP responses along with optional data contents, which are usually web pages such as HTML documents and images'. As the net gained popularity, the list could not keep up, and it soon fell into disrepair.

After this many small-time search engines were being created, the first pre-web one being ‘Archie', which was written by students in Montreal. Today very few servers still use this search tool, however a functioning Archie can still be found in Poland.

One of the first search engines to have the ability to search for any word in any webpage - which has since become the standard for all major search engine operators - was Webcrawler, which was released in 1994. Webcrawler was also one of the first search engines that was widely known by the public.

After another spew of smaller search engines were created, a few major companies started to stand out amongst the rest, such as Yahoo, Google and Microsoft's own MSN search. A timeline of some of these is listed below.

Timeline of Search Engine Launches

1993 Aliweb
1994 WebCrawler, Infoseek, Lycos
1995 AltaVista, Excite
1996 Dogpile, Inktomi, Ask Jeeves
1998 Google
2000 Baidu
2003 Info.com
2004 Yahoo! Search
2005 MSN Search
2006 wikiseek
2009 Bing

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