What is a search engine?
The World Wide Web, as of today, has millions of pages on it with almost each page having something unique to offer. How do you then, find the exact Web page that suits your need? If you are like most of the people using Internet, you go to a search engine to find the relevant site.
Search engines are names given to websites which help people in finding information from the Internet. Today, some of the most popular search engines are Google, Yahoo and MSN. Many other search engines also exist and almost every search engine employs a different technique to retrieve information.
Search Engines: Brief History
Before the first search engines came to picture, there was a complete list of webservers, available at the CERN University’s webserver. This list was edited by Tim Berners-Lee of the World Wide Web fame. However, as the Internet grew, maintaining this list became infeasible.
One of the very first tools to search the Internet before World Wide Web was popularized was Archie, created in 1990. Archie created a database of all the file names on public anonymous FTP without indexing the content of the files.
First Web search engines to appear were Wanlex (1993), Aliweb (1993) and Jumpstation (1994). None of these search engines, however, used to crawl the entire content of the Web pages. First full text crawler that came to picture and also the first search engine to be widely known was WebCrawler which was developed in 1994. This was followed by Lycos, which also turned out to be a major success. Many other search engines have followed since then and many among them have gained significant success. Search engine algorithms today are fast changing and improving to increase user’s satisfaction. Google, a search engine first launched in 1998 is the market leader in terms of search engine usage and commands as much as almost 70-80% of the searches taking place on the Internet.