Past Search Engines – The Evolution
We all know what a Search Engine is – and how we use them in everyday life. But can you remember the time before Google?
Here’s a timeline of the evolution of the Search Engine…
1989 – Archie was the very first search engine, that searched FTP sites to create an index for downloadable files, but not the contents for each site.
1993 – Aliweb was created. This crawled meta info and allowed users to submit web pages that they wanted to, although people didn’t know how to submit their sites!
1994 – Lycos website went public with 54,000 documents and ranked by relevance
1994 – Yahoo was created, which began as a collection of web pages that included man-made descriptions with each URL, and as they increased in size they became a searchable directory.
1995 – Excite was created, and the idea of this search engine was to use statistical analysis to provide efficient searches.
1995 – Altavista was the first search engine with unlimited bandwidth, natural language enquiries and advanced searching techniques.
1996 – Ask Jeeves is created – human editors tried to match search queries and rank by popularity. Unfortunately, this meant it was easy to spam
1996 – BackRub is created, which is a search engine utilised backlinks for search, and ranked pages based on how many links it had from other sites.
1997 – Google is born! Its algorithm is able to yield relevant search results at a very quick rate.
1998 – MSN is created, but relies on other networks until Google provides their backlinks.
2006 – Google acquires Youtube, which is now the second largest search engine.
2007 – Google created “Universal Search.”
2009 – MSN becomes ‘Bing’
2010 – Google Instant shows real-time search results for users as they enter a query.
2011 – Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft (Bing) create Schema.org. Which intentions of a more structured internet.
2014 – Yahoo! becomes the default search engine for Mozilla Firefox in the US.
2015 – Google unleashes Mobilegeddon to force websites to add mobile-friendly websites. The change acknowledges the rapid rise in mobile search use.
2017 – Google updates punish sites that use pop ups that are not mobile friendly
And there we have it, a timeline of all the Past Search Engines! With the internet ever changing, search engines will have to update and change in order to keep up with peoples changing needs.
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