While the internet is a vast stream of knowledge, surfing through this stream could be a hassle, especially if you are set to finding a specific piece of information. Search engines, with great improvements over the years, have made this issue less worrying with the ability to pinpoint the exact piece of information you desire, while also giving you a variety of other choices closely related to the answer or piece of information you seek.
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Basically all browsers and even some websites come with a search engine, this could be either a universal search engine or one created specifically for that browser or site, or even app. In this blog post, I’d be highlighting major search engines throughout the years starting with the first ever search engine created.
Search Engines: The Evolution
In the early years, after the birth of the internet, there were a lot of websites being created, in fact the number of websites grew so much that it became hard to index, pinpoint and retrieve information. Although at this time, search engines were created, none was “Revolutionary” as they just utilized simple indexing methods. But over the course of a few years, ARCHIE was created.
The First Revolutionary Step: Archie
Alan Emtage, Bill Heelan and J. Peter Deutsch Developed Archie, which is considered the world’s first search engine at McGill University in Montreal. Archie was very simple and may be considered primitive in the modern day. Archie was designed to index FTP archives and allow users to search for specific names. It was for sure without its limitations though; the web grew rapidly and different file types emerged, Archie just couldn’t provide good results anymore.
Gopher, Veronica and Jughead
Mark McCahill in the year 1991 created Gopher, providing a hierarchical directory system for organizing files at the University of Minnesota. Veronica and Jughead were also introduced, but as companions to Gopher; these search engines made it easier to identify and retrieve specific information. Future search engines would also emulate this.
JumpStation: Webcrawler
In 1993, JumpStation became the first Search engine to use the web crawling technology, aiding in indexing web pages so as to provide better and more comprehensive search results. This web crawling strategy laid the ground work for future search engines to be created.
Google: Huge milestone
Two Ph.D. students Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University in the year 1996 launched Google, a search engine that revolutionized the entire landscape of search engines with its PageRank algorithm, this algorithm ranked search results based on the number of quality links pointing to a web page. Instead of providing random suggestions, google ranks the best result for your specific search and gives it to you, this was just mind blowing at the time and a norm in recent times.
The PageRank algorithm by Google was so effective that almost all modern day search engines use the same algorithm or something similar. In the world of search engines, google has taken lead over the years especially with the new improvements they keep adding to the search engine, like voice search, which instead of typing out your search queries, you can just say them.
Yahoo was here before google, but you know, there can only be one king. The big question is ‘can any new or old, existing or yet to be created search engine beat google and take it off its thrown? Anything’s possible in the world wide web.
In conclusion, from FTP indexing to the hierarchical system to the web crawlers to the PageRank algorithm, there is no doubt that the technology of search engines since its creation to date has done nothing but improve and although it seems nothing more can be done to make search engines better or no new milestone can be reached; the ever evolving world of tech always has something new to dish out, so buckle up, sit back and brace yourself for the next big thing.