Search Engine history

The whole internet owes its origins to work done for the US military in the 1960s ( known as Advanced Research Projects Agency Network or, as it was shortened to, the ARPANET) which allowed messages to be sent between individual computers and a giant mainframe in an efficient manner. If you want to know more then go to Wikipedia which has the whole compex and technical story.

The networks based around the ARPANET were government funded and therefore restricted to non-commercial uses such as research; commercial use was strictly frowned upon. For this reason it was mainly used by the military and educational establishments. During the 1980s, the connections expanded to more educational institutions, and even to a growing number of companies for research.

The term "Internet" was first adopted in a report published in 1974. The first ARPANET connection outside the US was established to Norway in 1973, just ahead of the connection to the UK. It would be the late 1980s before Asia became connected.

During the late 1980s, the first Internet service provider (ISP) companies were formed. Again, Wikipedia covers this comprehensively, so if you want the full lowdown head there now!

The first search engine created seems to have been Archie, created in 1990 by Alan Emtage, a student at McGill University in Montreal. The original intention of the name was "archives," but it was then shortened to Archie.

Archie didn't have the capacities of today's search engines, but it did allow you to do wander around the internet (if you knew the name of a file you might be looking for!) In 1992 it contained about 2.6 million files with 150 gigabytes of information. However, Archie didn't index the content of text files. That capability came in 1991 with the development of another search, known as Gopher.

GOOGLE

According to the company itself, 'Google is a play on the word googol, which was coined by Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner, and was popularized in the book, Mathematics and the Imagination by Kasner and James Newman. It refers to the number represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros. Google's use of the term reflects the company's mission to organize the immense, seemingly infinite amount of information available on the web.'

Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, whilst students at Stanford University began collaboration on a search engine called BackRub in 1996 - named for its ability to analyze the "back links" pointing to a given website. Page was a great one for tinkering with mechanical things and it is said that he once managed to make a working printer out of Lego™ bricks!

By dint of persuasion and begging/borrowing they managed to assemble enough 'modern' computers to add to their network. Very soon, their unique approach earned BackRub cult status around the campus.

Page and Brin continued working to perfect their technology, and buying a terabyte of disks at bargain prices in 1998 built their own computer housings in Page's room, which was to become Google's first data center. And toward the end of the year they "put their studies aside" as the Google website has it, to raise 1 million dollars.

And from those humble beginnings grew the behemoth that is Google!

YAHOO!

Yahoo! started life as a directory of websites, created in 1994 by David Filo and Jerry Yang. Search was not considered so crucial until around 2002 when they seemed to have cottoned on to the way the internet was growing, and started aquiring search companies and related technology.

In the scramble to gain the upper hand, Overture purchased AllTheWeb and AltaVista in 2003. Yahoo! bought Inktomi in 2002 and then Overture in 2003, using the combined expertese to develop their own in-house search engine which appeared in 2004.

MSN

Microsoft seem to have only really got serious about search engine technology when they realised just how fast Google were growing. For several years from 1998 they relied on outsourcing partners such as Overture, Looksmart and Inktomi.

It was only in 2005 that they began their first in-house search engine, and in 2006 launched their MSN Live Search model.

THE OTHERS

Yes, there are lots more search engines out there. Free web submit sites will offer to submit your site to thousands! But when nearly 90% of searches worldwide are conducted over the top three, are the tiddlers really that important?

You also need to bear in mind that there is a lot of interaction and relationships between search engines - giving and taking results.

Meta Search Engines
Most meta search engines such as Hotbox and Dogpile draw their search results from multiple other search engines, then combine and rerank those results. This was a useful feature back when search engines were less clever at indexing the web. As search has improved the need for meta search engines has been reduced.

Add that to the fact that Google and Yahoo feed results or deliver pay to click ads into several smaller search engines and you begin to see that getting top listings on the tiddlers might seem good, but in fact is not going to do your business or website much good. YOU NEED TO BE THERE on Google, MSN and Yahoo!