The History of Internet Search Engines

The history of Internet search engines spans nearly 20 years, from 1990 to the present. The first search engines patrolled public directories, which contained only text and could not be searched using such as techniques as adding "AND" or "OR" to the search string. As search engines became more advanced, graphics and keywords (including detailed phrases) became an important component to the way we find things on the Internet.

Beginnings

The first Internet search engines focused on FTP sites and local directories--files and folders that were local to a mainframe, which might be a college's computer. University students created these early search engines and named them after comics characters--Archie, Veronica and Jughead.

Early 1990s

Excite, developed by Stanford undergraduates in 1993, searched by phrases that could find websites with entire sentence of keywords. The following year, Yahoo began, starting as only a collection of favorite websites of creators Jerry Yang and David Filo. Yahoo would soon begin enhancing its website by letting users search the entire World Wide Web.

Indexing

Most Internet search engines use bots to penetrate the Internet and seek new sites and updated webpages. In 1994, Michael Maudlin developed Lycos, which indexed more than 60 million web pages, surpassing other engines at the time. Indexing is when search engine computers go to web pages and pull out phrases and keywords that can be used in a search.

Google

Google was introduced in 1997 and began as a project for students at Stanford University. Today, Google uses advanced indexing techniques and algorithms, which are formulas that compute how the phrase is interpreted, that put it ahead of most search engines. Search engines can be complex, such as Google competitor Wolfram Alpha's detailed computation engine that is used for mathematic and scientific searches.

Fun Fact

Archie is the world "Archive" minus the V. Veronica stands for Very Easy Rodent Oriented Netwide Index to Computerized Archives. Jughead is Jonzy's Universal Gopher Heirarchy Excavation and Display.

References

• Search Engine History Site

Resources

• Search Engine History Site