History of search engines

History of search engines

A search engine is a software designed to search for information on the World Wide Web. The first search engine to come up was Archie in Sept 90, it stands for "archive" without the "v". Created by Alan Emtage, of McGill University in Montreal. A few others are, Lycos (1994) Excite (1995) AltaVista (1995) acquired by Yahoo, Dogpile (1996). One of the first "all text" crawler-based search engine was WebCrawler (1994). 

It allowed users to search for any word in any webpage, which is the standard for all search engines now. Microsoft first launched MSN Search in 1998 and was providing search services based on Inktomi's search engine. Later on Yahoo! switched to Google's search engine until 2004. Then it launched its own search engine called msnbot using their technology and web crawler. Yahoo! and Microsoft finalized Yahoo! Search powered by Microsoft Bing technology in 2009. 

Around 2000, Google's search engine rose to prominence. As of now it is the most-used search engine handling three billion searches a day with 90% market share. The company prospered using an innovation called PageRank - an algorithm to rank websites to measure their importance, the underlying assumption being, important websites receive more links from other websites.