Search Engines

What is a search engine?

A search engine is a web site, or Internet service that provides the user with relevant results for the search performed.

Major Search Engines

Since 1998 the major search engines have pretty well much stayed the same. This consists mainly of Google, Yahoo, MSN & Ask.

These search engines all have their own technology that searches the Internet for relevant results.

Although there are many more search engines than the above four, these four are the major players and cover more than 80% of the web search market.

Search Engine History

Search engines came as a result of Archie, which was launched in 1990. Archie was the first active search engine on the Internet.

When the Internet was just text and a flashing cursor on a blank screen (www did not exist), the only search service out there was Archie. Archie was basically a list of computers and the files on those computers. The majority of these computers were not like web sites you see today, e.g. graphics and links, but basically a list of files on a computer. To read these files you had to download them from the computer in question and use a text editor, or relevant application (e.g. Word) to read the contents of the file.

This type of search evolved into a more powerful facility called Veronica & Jughead in 1991. Whilst these search systems were (in principle) the same as Archie, they had the added functionality of indexing text files. This gave rise to the ability to not only search for files, but search the files themselves.

Although the world wide web (www) had not emerged as we know it today, the search industry was born.

In 1991 hypertext was linked with TCP (the protocol for the Internet) and the World Wide Web was born.

In 1993 ALIWEB was born. ALIWEB had a robot that crawled the web and produced an index of related web sites. ALIWEB took the META information from the web pages to provide relevant search results.
Although ALIWEB was providing results for searches, unless you knew exactly what it was you wanted it was difficult to locate a web site that had what you wanted.

In 1994 one of the first web directories was formed. With web sites placed into categories similar to what you see today, searching the Internet was becoming easier.

Also in 1994 Yahoo was born as a collection of favourite web pages organised into categories.

A lot happened in 1994, as WebCrawler was born. It was the first web crawler that indexed entire web pages. This gave rise to the ability to find relevant web pages.

In 1994 Lycos was also born. Lycos used similar technology to WebCrawler, indexing entire web pages. By 1997 Lycos´ web crawler had indexed over 60 million documents.

This gave the industry a boost and between 1994 and 1996 several search technologies were developed and released, namely Looksmart, Inktomi and Ask Jeeves.

In 1998 Google was launched. Although one of the last to be born, Google has become the largest and most popular search engine of them all.

Directories

Local Directories

Local directories are very popular with local search. With the launch of Google´s local search facility, local directories are becoming more and more popular.

It is easy to find a service in your local area and provides you with alternative contact details, such as address and post code.

An example of a local directory is Web Design Directory UK