History of Search Engines

History of Search Engines

In the early days of Internet development, the amount of available information was relatively small and the accesses of user are also less. Access was mainly restricted to employees of various universities and laboratories who used it to access scientific information. In those days, the problem of finding information on the Internet was not nearly as critical as it is now.

Website directories were one of the first methods used to access the information resources on the network. Links to these resources were grouped by topic. Yahoo was the first project of this kind opened in April 1994. As the number of websites in the Yahoo directory increased, the developer’s team of Yahoo made the directory searchable. Yahoo was not a search engine because searching was limited to those resources who’s listings were put into the directory.

Such link directories have been used in the past, but now a day they have lost much of their popularity. The reason is simple – even modern directories with lots of resources only provide information on a tiny fraction of the Internet.

For example, the largest directory on the network is currently DMOZ (or Open Directory Project). DMOZ contains information on about five million resources. Compare this with the Google search engine database containing more than eight billion documents.

The WebCrawler project started in 1994 and was the first full-featured search engine. The Lycos and AltaVista search engines appeared in 1995 and for many years Alta Vista was the major player in this field.

In 1997 Sergey Brin and Larry Page created Google as a research project at Stanford University. Google is now the most popular search engine in the world.

Currently, there are three leading international search engines – Google, Yahoo and MSN Search. They each have their own databases and search algorithms. Many other search engines use results originating from these three major search engines and the same seo expertise can be applied to all of them. For example, the AOL search engine (search.aol.com) uses the Google database while AltaVista, Lycos and AllTheWeb all use the Yahoo database.