The Search Engine

By mncross0205

  • Archie

    Archie
    Three students at McGill University at Montreal release Archie. File names were searchable, however information was not indexed. Information had to be manually searched.

  • Gopher

    Gopher
    Mark McCahill, a student at the University of Minnesota, created ahypertext paradigm, which also searched for plain text references in files.

  • Excite

    Excite
    Students at Stanford created the idea for Excite. They used statistical analysis to improve web searches. It was available to the public in 1995. It has been sold a few times, now existic as a pay-per-click site in conjunction with Ask Jeeves.

  • Yahoo

    Yahoo
    David Filo and Jerry Yang started Yahoo! in 1994. It was a directory that included an extensive list of websites. Today, Yahoo is one of the top search engines.

  • Lycos

    Lycos
    Created at Ccarnegie Mellon Universty. It was founded on $2 million in venture capital and was founded by researchers. At the time it was the largest search engine. Lycos had the largest index at the end of 1996 with 60 million documents.

  • AltaVista

    AltaVista
    Scientists developed a search tool to crawl, store and quickly index every word of all HTML web pages on the Internet. This new search tool was more powerful than anything that had existed before. In August 1995, it did a web search that brought up 10 million pages, which was the most extensive search to date.

  • Inktomi

    Inktomi
    Inktomi was the first seach engine to incorporate software at the core of the Internet. They were able to manage data flow and control bandwidth, which no other search engine had sought to do.

  • Ask Jeeves

    Ask Jeeves
    Ask was developed in 1996 by Garret Gruener and David Warthen and launched in 1997 as Ask Jeeves. In 2006, the “Jeeves” name was removed. They focused on television ads to help drive customers to their website, competing with Yahoo and Lycos for web traffic.

  • Google

    Google
    Founded at Standford University as a school project, Larry Page and Sergey Brin began researching the concept of a search engine based on relevancy ranking. Google created the relevancy feature to help narrow results. Today, Google accounts for about 70% of all web searches.

  • MSN

    MSN
    While it was debuted in 1995 as part of Microsoft's network of web services, it wasn't until 1998 that it was launched as a stand alone search engine, using Inktomi's search results. Today, MSN is Windows Live.