Search Engines - A Brief History

• Early Search Engines
  • Search Engines have been around since the Web beginning of the Web. The first search engines did not use any sophistocated IR techniques: e.g. Archie, the Wanderer, Yahoo!
    
    
  • The first engine to begin using statistical information was Architext (an engine used for individual Web sites), which later became Excite.
    
    
  • A 1994 class project by Brian Pinkerton at the U of Washington became a huge success - WebCrawler was the first Web indexing system to look at the full text of Web sites. It therefore had to use document ranking metrics such as TF/IDF. After clogging the UW bandwidth with traffic from Web users, WebCrawler was bought by AOL and then later Excite (modern version still powers Excite and AOL's NetFind).
    
    
  • Lycos, Infoseek, AltaVista, and others quickly followed, most with slightly different twists on document ranking.
    
    
  • Meta-search engines such as HotBot attempted to solve the problem of differences between engines
    
    
  • Today, Inktomi and Google dominate the Web indexing business.
    
    

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