HISTORY OF SEARCH ENGINES

The World Wide Web is a boon to the modern day data mining wherein the boundaries if any are virtual. Ironically, the web is not an asset if the avid surfer is bereft of the navigation tools – the Search Engines. The engines were hitherto unknown as recently as twenty years ago which is astonishing in itself considering that the contemporary surfer uses the engine as routine and knows no other way of accessing data while working the world wide web.

The first tool to be used in searching the net was none other than ‘Archie’ which is synonym with ‘archives’ without the ‘v’. The process owner of ‘Archie’ was Alan Emtage way back in 1990 who was but a student at McGill University in Montreal. The programme was scheduled to download the directory listings of all the files located on FTP (File Transfer Protocol) sites thereby generating a searchable database of file names.

Unlike ‘Archie’, which indexed computer files, another tool ‘Gopher’ indexed plain text documents, came into existence in 1991, and was created by Mark McCanhill at the University of Minnesota. It is common knowledge that it was named after the school mascot.

Once the World Wide Web came into existence, most ‘Gopher’ sites became web sites considering that they were web sites.

‘Yahoo’ came into being in 1994 and the credit for it’s creation goes to the duo of Jeny Yang and David Filo which was initiated as a listing of web sites and what set it apart from the masses was the distinction of having a URL and also a description of the page.

Later in the year, the web saw the advent of the ‘Web Crawler’ which was the first full text search engine on the Internet.

‘Lycos’ introduced relevant retrieval and word proximity in addition to prefix matches in the same year.

The year 1996 was to witness ‘Lycos’ attain the distinction of being the search engine with the largest number of indexed documents – sixty million! ‘Lycos’ was the brain child of Dr Michael Mauldin created in the academic ambience of Carnegie Mellon University.

The year 1995 saw the advent of ‘Alta Vista’ – the first search engine to recognize natural language and the pioneer in utilizing high – end search techniques. The engine with a difference is adept at using multimedia to search for videos, music and photos.

The following year was to witness an addition to the stable of search engines with Inktomi at UC Berkeley. Inktomi went on to utilize ‘concept induction’ technology which inputs the experience of human analysis and aligns it to a computerized analysis of the likes of links and usage with the objective of ascertaining the most productive and popular sites.

Search engine major Yahoo acquired Inktomi in the year 2003.

The year 1997 continued to be the year of search engines with the dual launch of ‘Ask Jeeves’ and ‘Northern Light’.

Significantly the now familiar ‘Google’ came into existence in the same year and was conceptualized and launched by Sergey Brin and Larry Page as a research project at the Stanford University.

‘MSN Search’ and ‘Open Directory’ were to become household names in the year of their inception – 1998.

‘Open Directory’ is maintained purely on human input and is global in inputs considering that a global cohort of editors maintain the site. The ‘Open Directory’ has the enviable status of maintaining the most comprehensive directory of human edited documents.

This history of search engines is but a preclude to the wonders and evolution of the modern day search engines which are an indispensable tool in the hands of the discerning surfer of contemporary times!

Copyright © Arun Tibrewal, all rights reserved. This article can not be reprinted, reproduced and modified as per publishers terms.