Search Engines: A Brief History
Search engines are one of the most used tools on the internet, allowing users to easily search for information, products, and services. But, how did search engines come about? Let’s take a look at the history of search engines.
The first search engine to be created was Archie, created in 1990 by Alan Emtage, a student at McGill University in Montreal. It was designed to search files located on the FTP sites. Archie was the first program to search the web but it didn’t have a graphical interface.
The first web search engine with a graphical interface was created by Matthew Gray in 1993. It was called World Wide Web Wanderer and it was designed to measure the size of the web.
In 1994, a team of students at Stanford University created a search engine called WebCrawler. It was the first search engine to index entire web pages and it was the first to use a crawler-based technology.
Two years later, in 1996, two Stanford students, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin, created a search engine called BackRub. It used a page rank algorithm to rank pages by their importance. This was the foundation for what would become Google.
In 1997, one of the first search engine companies, Excite, was founded. It quickly became one of the most popular search engines.
In 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin officially launched Google. It quickly became the most popular search engine. Google used a unique algorithm that ranked pages by their relevance to a search query.
In 1999, Yahoo! launched its search engine. It was the first search engine to use sponsored links.
In the 2000s, other search engines began to emerge, such as MSN Search, Ask.com, and AltaVista.
Today, Google is the most popular search engine, with a market share of more than 70%. Other search engines, such as Bing, Yahoo!, and Baidu, have smaller market shares.
Search engines have come a long way since their creation in the 1990s. They have become an essential part of the internet and they have changed the way people access information. From Archie to Google, the history of search engines is an interesting one.