A Brief History of Search Engines
Post On:
March 8, 2012
The history of search engines and the history of the Internet have been in parallel with one another as the rapid growth of the Internet necessitated a way to catalog the prodigious amount of information being created online. The tool that was to catalog this information was the search engine.
The concept of hypertext and memory extension which can be seen as a basis of search engines can find its origins traced back to July 1945 in the form of an article by Vannevar Bush in the Atlantic Monthly. As We May Think urged scientists to work together to build a body of knowledge that benefits all man-kind. His idea was for a fast, limitless, reliable, extensible memory storage system and device that he called a memex.
1990
Archie, ‘archive’ without the ‘v’ was the first search engine. It was an FTP site that hosted an index of downloadable directory listings. Due to limited space, only listings were available.
1991
Veronica, or “Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index to Computer Archives” and Jughead or “Jonzy’s Universal Gopher Hierarchy Excavation And Display” searched file names and titles stored in Gopher index systems. While this is a play on a famous comic strip, the initial Archie was not.
1992
VLib was part of the ‘World Wide Web‘ created by Tim Berners-Lee. It consisted of webservers hosted at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.
1993
World Wide Web Wander was a ‘bot’ or software that started by counting active web servers and ‘measures the growth’ of the Internet. The software was later modified to capture web links. It was created by Matthew Gray.
AliWEB, created by Martjin Koster crawled Meta Info and allowed the user to submit the pages that they wanted indexed along with a description. It was more of a directory than a bot and was challenging for users to submit their sites.
1993
This was the beginning of primitive web search. Jumpstart contained information about a page’s title and header using simple linear search. The World Wide Worm indexed titles and URLs, and the RBSE Spider was a ranking system.
1994
Infoseek enabled webmasters to submit a page in realtime. In 1995, Netscape began using them as their default search.
AltaVista offered unlimited bandwidth and allowed natural language queries for the first time. It also had advanced searching techniques and enabled submitters to add or delete their URL within 24 hours. Google and Inktomi would later make their system irrelevant. Overture intended to purchase AltaVista for $80 million in stock and $60 million in cash. Overture was later bought by Yahoo.
WebCrawler was the first crawler that indexed entire web pages. It was initially so popular that it was difficult to use in the daytime. It was later bought out by AOL in 1995.
Yahoo, created by David Filo and Jerry Yang began as a collection of favorable web pages. The directory’s size enabled it to eventually become a searchable directory that featured a manually-entered description of each URL. Informational sites could be added for free but commercial sites could later be added for a fee. A downfall of the manual review process is that it resulted in long wait times for prospective listings. In 2002, Yahoo began working on their search engine again by buying up and integrating other search directories. Prior to that, it had outsourced this work.
Lycos went public with a catalog of 54,000 documents that ranked Relevance retrieval. By 1996, it had identified 60 milllion documents. It was later sold to the largest search engine is South Korea.
1996
Google, the largest and most popular search engine started by Larry Page and Sergei Brin, started as BackRub, a search engine which utilized backlinks for search. It used citation ranking which means any mention on another site would count as vote toward the mentioned site. The site’s authority and reliability came from how many people linked to the site and how ‘trustworthy’ those sites were. In 1998 BackRub was renamed to Google. Unable to sell the project, the team received funding from Sequoia and other investors. Over the next couple of years, Google would go onto release other related things that would cement its leadership in the search space. This includes the Google Toolbar, Adsense and more.
1997
Ask.com/Ask Jeeves was a natural language search engine where human editors matched search queries. In 2005, IAC buys Ask Jeeves for $1.85 billion and changes the name to Ask.com.
1998
MSN search launches relying on other search engine technologies until Google’s backlinks model could be proven sucessful. in 2004, MSN previewed a new search engine using technology developed in-house that was released the following year.
Open Directory Project or DMOZ launched that was the largest directory run by volunteer editors. It was bought by Netscape in the same year Netscape was purchased by AOL for $4.5 billion.
1999
AllTheWeb debuts with a sleek interface and advanced features. It was eventually rolled into Yahoo search and shuttered in 2011.
Overture.com, formerly Goto.com is the first company to successfully provide a pay-per-click search service. They eventually go on to buy AltaVista and AllTheWeb and are they, themselves purchased in 2003 by Yahoo to form the foundation of Yahoos pay-per-click program.
2006
Overture owner Bill Gross launches the Snap search engine. It was proven to be too complicated for the average web-surfer and did not gain any traction.
Microsoft launches LiveSearch.
2008
Launched by former Google employees, CUIL has indexed 127 billion web pages as of February 2009 and closed its doors in 2010. Its patents were acquired by Google in early 2012.
2009
MSN/LiveSearch rebranded by Microsoft into Bing.com.
Next up, a Brief History of Social Networking.
First Post via Social surveyor
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March 5, 2012
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A Brief History of the World Wide Web
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March 2, 2012
The World Wide Web (www) has often been used interchangeably with the Internet. This is in fact, not correct. The World Wide Web is a global information medium in which users can read and write via computers on the Internet. It is a sub-set of the Internet much like email is.
The history of the Internet predates the history of the Internet by several years. Whereas the creation of the Internet can be traced back to 1969, the World Wide Web can trace its origin back to 1980 to Tim Berners Lee, an independent contractor working at CERN or the European Center for Nuclear Research. Over the course of a ten year period, Tim Bermers-Lee addressed several different aspects of the presentation of data on the Internet. By 1990, he had built all of the tools needed for a working web, HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) 0.9, the Hypertext MarkUp Language (HTML), the first web browser which was also the first HTML editor, called World Wide Web, the first web server software, the first web server, and the first web pages. On August 6, 1991, Tim Berners-Lee posted a summary of his project on the alt.hypertext newsgroup. This date also marks the debut of the Web as a public service on the Internet.
The turning point for the World Wide Web was the creation of the Mosaic browser, led by Marc Andreesen and Eric Bina, computer science students at the University of Illinois (UIUC). After graduation, Marc Andreesen joined forces with James H Clark, former CEO of Silicon Graphics to form Mosaic Communications Corporation to develop the Mosaic browser commercially. In 1994, the company changed its name to Netscape and released shortly thereafter went onto release the Netscape Navigator. Marc Andreesen has gone on to become a very success entrepreneur and one of the most powerful investors in Silicon Valley.
In the late 90s, many of the leading global corporations went about establishing their web presence and the growth rate took off from there.
Next up, the history of search engines.
A Brief History of the Internet
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March 1, 2012
The history of the Internet started in the 1950’s with the creation of the computer and the search for ways to connect or ‘network’ computers. While there were several networks established in the 60s and 70s that sought to expand point-to-point communications between computers, it was ARPANET in particular that led to the development of internetworking, where multiple separate networks could be joined together to make a network of networks.
ARPANET, or Advanced Research Project Agency Network, was the first operational packet switching network and key component that would go on to become the global Internet. The network was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of the United States Department of Defense that was used for its projects at universities and research laboratories in the United States.
In 1982, the Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP), a set of communication and networking protocols used for the Internet in other similar networks was standardized and the concept of a world-wide network of connected TCP/IP networks called the Internet was introduced. In the mid-eighties and early nineties, Internet service providers (ISP), organizations that provide access to the Internet began to emerge.
Since the mid-nineties, the Internet has had a huge impact on culture and commerce globally. Tomorrow, I will write about the history of the World Wide Web to be followed by a history of search engines, search engine marketing, social networking websites and more till we arrive to the current trends. From there, I will cover interesting things Internet and social media.
Please let me know any ideas or suggestions that you would like for me to explore.