History Of Search Engines
During the early development of the web, there was a list of webservers edited by Tim Berners-Lee and hosted on the CERN webserver. One historical snapshot from 1992 remains.As more webservers went online the central list could not keep up. On the NCSA site new servers were announced under the title "What's New!"
The name stands for "archive" without the "v". It was created in 1990 by Alan Emtage, Bill Heelan and J. Peter Deutsch, computer science students at McGill University in Montreal. The program downloaded the directory listings of all the files located on public anonymous FTP (File Transfer Protocol)
sites, creating a searchable database of file names; however, Archie
did not index the contents of these sites since the amount of data was
so limited it could be readily searched manually.
Around 2000, Google's search engine rose to prominence.The company achieved better results for many searches with an innovation called PageRank. This iterative algorithm
ranks web pages based on the number and PageRank of other web sites and
pages that link there, on the premise that good or desirable pages are
linked to more than others. Google also maintained a minimalist
interface to its search engine. In contrast, many of its competitors
embedded a search engine in a web portal.
By 2000, Yahoo! was providing search services based on Inktomi's search engine. Yahoo! acquired Inktomi in 2002, and Overture (which owned AlltheWeb
and AltaVista) in 2003. Yahoo! switched to Google's search engine until
2004, when it launched its own search engine based on the combined
technologies of its acquisitions.
Microsoft first launched MSN Search in the fall of 1998 using search
results from Inktomi. In early 1999 the site began to display listings
from Looksmart blended with results from Inktomi except for a short time in 1999 when results from AltaVista were used instead. In 2004, Microsoft began a transition to its own search technology, powered by its own web crawler (called msnbot).
Microsoft's rebranded search engine, Bing, was launched on June 1, 2009. On July 29, 2009, Yahoo! and Microsoft finalized a deal in which Yahoo! Search would be powered by Microsoft Bing technology.
