Search Engines – Past and Present Revealed

Search engines have become part of every web user life. Right from small piece of information to online books and up-to-date stock information, for any kind of information, web users are considering search engines as the best knowledge rich databases to search.

In 1993, Mathew Gray in MIT developed first search engine “Wandex”, collected information to its index using web crawler “World Wide Web Wanderer”. Another search engine was developed in the same year was “Aliweb”( Archie Like Indexing for the WEB), which is live till date.

1994 , contributed to full text crawler based search engine “Web Crawler” and Lycos another,web's earliest crawler-based search engines.

Major search engines emerged in long run:

• Yahoo (1994 ): Yahoo still remains to be most popular search engine on the web. Yahoo was re-structured itself in October 2002.
• Open Text (1995) : Opent Text was Yahoo's original search partner was also a popular web search site of its own in 1995. Open Text crawled the web to gather listings, its Web search operations closed in mid-1997.
• Magellan (1995): Another early search engine , was later purchased by Excite in 1996. It halted operations in April 2001.
• Infoseek (1995) : Emerged in early 1995, Later renamed as "Go.", stopped its own internal search operations in 2001. Today, Go remains operating, powered by Google.
• Excite (1995) : In late 1995, Excite was launched and started crawled the web to gather listings. In 1996, acquired, Magellan and WebCrawler, to merge into Excite@Home., later stopped gathering its own listings in December 2001.
• AltaVista (1995 ) : Launched in December 1995, AltaVista offered access to a huge index of web sites. It was relaunched as a portal in October 1999.
• HotBot (1996) : Launched in May 1996, HotBot was initially powered by Inktomi and backed by Wired. Hotbot was acquired by Lycos (now Terra Lycos) bought in 1998. Later in 2002 reborn as Meta search engine.
• LookSmart (1996) : LookSmart was launched in 1996, was the only search company to depend upon humans to build index.. In 2002, LookSmart bought the WiseNut crawler to complement its human-powered results.
• Snap (1997) : Snap was launched by CNET in 1997, closed its internal search operations in 2001. Currently powered by meta search results from Infospace.
• AOL Search (1997) : Initially AOL owned its own web search technology, WebCrawler, but sold that to Excite in 1996. Later named as AOL NetFind in 1997, offered search results powered by Excite and currently powered by Google.
• MSN Search (1998) : Launched in 1998 , Microsoft Branded MSN search ,later renamed as Live Search remains one of the most popular search engines on the web.
• Direct Hit (1998-2002): Direct Hit was launched in 1998, was later purchased by Ask Jeeves in 2000, and formally closed in early 2002.
• Ask Jeeves (1998): Launched as the "natural language" search engine in 1998, Ask purchased Direct Hit in early 2000, and Teoma in 2001. From 2002, operating on Teoma search technology.
• Overture (1998 ): Earleir names as GoTo, launched a "paid placement" service in 1998, From 2000, Overture started providing its paid listings major search engines such as MSN and Yahoo.
• Google (1998): Launched in 1998, Google's emerged as it is today the most popular search engine world wide and is diversifying it operations and acquiring companies such as You Tube and Double Click.
• AllTheWeb (1999): AllTheWeb was launched in May 1999 and present has Lycos as its major partner.
• Teoma (2000): Launched in 2000, later purchased by Ask Jeeves in September 2001, At present providing results on as its own site, as well as to the Ask .com.
• GigaBlast.com(2000) : Founded in 2000 , claims to be largest and freshest indexes search engine in the world.
• WiseNut (2001): Launched in 2001 and was later acquired by Look Smart search engine
• OpenFind(2002) : Launched on july5 2002 open find is a, large independently –built search engine.
• ZotSpot (2004) : Founded in 2004 . it claims shares its revenue with its users.
• Hakia (2007) : New Semantic or meaning based search engine in beta version.

Search engines are constantly updating and refining their search technologies to offer high quality search results to their users, there by becoming the most preferred destination source for search activities.