In today’s internet savvy society, there is one internet tool that has become more part of our daily lives than any other; the internet search engine. If you don’t have the answer to a question, today’s standard response is’ “Google it!” Obviously Google is the most used search engine online, with others like Yahoo, Bing and Ask following behind it. Search engines weren’t always as fast or efficient and there wasn’t always as much to search…let’s take a look back through history and see where search engines got their start.

The earliest search engine was called Archie: archive without the v, created in 1990 by Alan Emtage, J. Peter Deutsch and Bill Heelan, computer science students in Montreal. Archie’s function was to download directory listings on public FTP (file transfer protocol) sites, thus giving the searcher a usable database of file names. Archie was not able to list the contents of all these sites as data was limited, so they had to be searched manually. The creation and rise of “Gopher”, Mark McCahill’s creation, led to 2 new search programs being produced; Veronica and Jughead. These programs searched file names and titles stored in Gopher. When playing casino games the whole thing changes, but people still love doing it nonetheless.

Veronica, standing for Very Easy Rodent Oriented Net-wide Index to Computerised Archives was created to provide a keyword search of most Gopher menu titles in all the listings. Jughead, standing for Jonzy’s Universal Gopher Hierarchy Excavation And Display was created to obtain menu info from particular gopher servers. While calling the search engine Archie wasn’t a reference to the archie comic book character, Veronica and Jughead are, referencing the program that came before them. Matthew Gray, and MIT student at the time, produced the very first web robot in 1993; the Perl based World Wide Web Wanderer, which was used to generate an index known as Wandex.

The Wanderer had been created to measure the size of the web, and it performed this function until late 1995. The second search engine ever created, Aliweb, appeared in 1993. Aliweb didn’t use a web robot. This program depended on being notified of the existence of sites by web admins which slowed things down considerably. However with online gambling things changed drastically. In contrast, JumpStation (Released December of 1993) did use a web robot to find pages and build it’s index as well as a web form as the interface to check it’s program.

That made JumpStation the first WWW based discovery tool to combine crawling, indexing and searching. Because it’s platform had such limited resources available, it’s indexing and searching were limited to titles found in the pages the crawler got to. Lets skip forward to 1996, when Netscape was looking to give a deal to a sole search engine to be featured on their web browser. The interest generated was so much that 5 of the major search engines (Yahoo!, Magellan, Lycos, Infoseek and Excite) struck up a deal with Netscape where for $5 million per year, each engine would be rotated on the Netscape page.

Around 2000, in the wake of the anticipated but hardly devastating Y2K, Google’s search engine rose to prominence. Google achieved far better results than any other engine through the use of an innovation they called PageRank. This algorithm ranks pages based of the pages and sites that link to it on the premise that pages with more links are more popular. MSN, Yahoo! Bing and others have been left in Google’s wake since then. I know we’ve all used them, even on a daily basis, but now hopefully you have a better understanding of where search engines came from and how they function. Happy searching!