History Of Search Engines
Evolution of Search Engines
evolution of search engines: past, present, future
Origin and Evolution
The history and evolution of search engines can be divided into distinct periods. The first period begins from the development of Archie, which was a search engine program launched in 1990 by a group of university students. The Archie program worked by scanning files on scattered servers connected to the Internet and retrieving them for users using FTP protocol. A few years later, Veronica and Jughead search engines were launched that could search and retrieve documents using the Gopher protocol. An important breakthrough took place with the launch of the first robot search tool, the Wanderer. This was the precursor to the modern day web crawlers and worked by scanning the World Wide Web and indexing data from servers as well as URLS on a database. However, it was quite inefficient and required a lot of improvement. ALIWEB was a modification of the Archie engine because it could search and retrieve files in HTTP, the protocol used for modern day files on the Internet. In 1994, Yahoo! emerged as the first online directory that also provided short descriptions of the search results, similar to modern search engines. At about the same time, the WebCrawler was launched as a unique program that not only scanned the URLs of the web pages but also their complete text. Other innovations were Lycos and Alta Vista. These early search engines developed the advertising-based revenue model for search engines where advertisements were displayed on the top or the right side of the search results page. In the words of Van Couvering (2008):
"The first period of search engine history is characterized by technological innovation within research centers followed by commercialization using advertising and licensing as business models and capitalization through venture capital and the stock market. The market was competitive, consisting of multiple companies with different technologies."
During the next period, the dot-com bubble burst left behind only a few search engine companies to compete effectively. Many of the companies like MSN and Yahoo developed into web portals offering a search engine feature as one component of their services. But it was Google that became popular from 2000 onwards as a dedicated search engine. Its focus on the search engine service allowed it to gain credibility as a reliable and efficient search engine. It developed a unique search algorithm and page ranking techniques to improve the relevance of its search results. While the popularity of Yahoo declined as a search engine, it continued to acquire websites like Flickr to improve its service package. MSN continued to retain its search feature with MSN Search and modified it from time to Live Search and ultimately Bing. Bing now operates separately from the MSN portal as a separate search engine, similar to Google's search engine.
In recent years, the competition between Google and MSN has intensified with Google developing Google Desktop that combines desktop applications with a search feature while MSN has also developed Bing as a dedicated search engine to compete with Google. With the development of portable computing devices like the Smartphone, search engines are developing new interfaces for compatibility with mobile devices. One important feature that Yahoo and MSN have adopted is the question answering feature where users may post questions to be answered by others. This reflects a fight for "content and market share in verticals outside of the core algorithmic search product (Wall, n.a.)."
Examples of Search Engines
A number of search engines are used today with each offering some common and some unique services and features. The leading search engine is Google that has continued to enjoy growing popularity since 2000. Yahoo and MSN also provide search engine features as part of their portal services. Alta Vista is an important earlier search engine. I introduced many features that are popular today. It used a web crawler similar to many modern websites. It also scanned full text sites instead of just the URLs. It also had a simple uncluttered interface, which was the inspiration for Google's clean interface that makes searching easy and less distracting. Ask.com is also a popular search engine that was earlier names AskJeeves.com.
Distinguishing Features of Search Engines
Bing is the latest development in the search engine arena. It is the latest competitive action made by MSN to capture market share from rival Google by providing a dedicated search engine with an interface...
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