A brief history of the search engine   

The history of the search engine began in 1990 when a student from McGill University, Alan Emtage, created the first search engine named "Archie". All it did was to collect filenames and store them into a database and when a user asked for a certain file, Archie would search its database and if a match was found the file was retrieved and presented to the user. But little did Emtage know that his concept would revolutionize the way the internet is searched today.

The "World Wide Web Wanderer" was the first web search engine made to try and catalogue the internet. The Wanderer was developed by Matthew Gray, a student of MIT, and was deployed onto the web in 1993. It used "robot" technology which can record the progress of the web by counting the number of servers connected to the internet. But as a bonus, it recorded URLs as well and stored the information in a database called Wandex. However, early robot technologies were known to crash servers because they consumed a large amount of network bandwidth.

Yahoo! is a popular search engine first deployed onto the web in 1994. It was developed by David Filo and Jerry Yang, both were students of Stanford University. Yahoo! then was essentially Filo’s and Yang’s list of favourite websites, but its popularity grew rapidly in the University mainly because it was easy to use (still is!). The downside of Yahoo! though at that time was that it was only able to catalogue 1% of the World Wide Web because the process (catalog and review) was all done by people.

In December 1995, Altavista was launched onto the web. It was developed by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), initially intended to search their databases containing a massive amount of data about their products and services. It used the new spider technology that was capable of indexing about ten million web pages everyday. Altavista was fast and it became the primary choice of web surfers at the time because it seemed to reach the furthest corners of the web.

Eric Brewer and Paul Gauthier of Berkeley launched "HotBot" in May of 1996. It was primarily licensed to a website of an electronics magazine and driven by Inktomi search engine. Able to index more than 10 million web pages daily, it was the fastest and most dominant search engine at the time.

Then in 1997 appeared the most popular search engine the web had ever known, Google. It was developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin from Stanford University a year earlier. Google invented a unique way of ranking websites which is called Pagerank. It is a kind of voting system for websites. Sites with a high number of votes or back links would obtain a higher ranking. Google today has an impressive 85% of the internet’s websites in its index.

Search engines are tools that can be very useful and helpful in finding the information you need from the internet. In general, they will provide you with just about any information you want. All you have to do is enter the keywords into the search bar and as if by magic your query is answered instantly.

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