Ever since the world wide web became the engine of our lives, search has been the holy grail for developers and companies. Beginning with Archie in 1990, considered the first search engine, moving on to Excite and Lycos and Infoseek, by the mid 90s there was a veritable flood of search engines, particularly after Google showed how it should be done in 1996. The complexity of the algorithms was now matched only by the voracious appetite of searchers as the number of pages to be indexed ran into billions. Invariably, a lot of them positioned themselves as specialized engines—for kids or jobs or tech or entertainment. Then came the deep web search engines like http://www.deepdyve.com/ which indexed obscure and often not-easy to find content.
add_main_imagePost-Google, there were the much touted “google killers” including Cuil (pronounced Cool ) and Dogpile. While the former is no more, the latter is now just a Google clone. Unbelievably, there have also been those that have tried to go the human-powered search way! With a million plus spam pages being generated every day besides the billions of legitimate ones, you would imagine most humans would be daunted.
As the original super spider, AltaVista, shuts down, here’s a brief history of some of the better known search engines through the years:NextMAds
1990: Archie—the very first search engine
1991: Veronica and Jughead
1992: Vlib
1993: Excite and World wide web wanderer
1994: AltaVista, Galaxy, Yahoosearch, Infoseek, Webcrawler, LycossixthMAds
1995: Looksmart
1996: Google, HotBot, Inktomi
1997: Ask.com
1998: MSN; dmoz
1999: Alltheweb
2005: Snap
2006: Microsoft Livesearch
2008: Cuil
2009: Microsoft Bing
Source: http://www.wordstream.com/articles/internet-search-engines-history
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