Writing a ‘brief’ history of search engines isn’t easy because where does one start from? In order to familiarize yourself with the history of search engines, you will first need to take a quick look at the history of the Internet. So let’s dig up the archives now!
A Quick History Lesson Of The Internet
Undoubtedly the Internet is the biggest achievement of the 20th Century. It allows an almost limitless flow of cross-information and connects billions of people across the borders with the knowledge they seek. The Internet was born in the 1960s and the forefathers of this platform are J.C.R. Licklider and Leonard Kleinrock from the the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). It was Licklider, who gave the idea of a "Galactic Network" or of computers interconnected globally through which, people could quickly and easily access data as well as programs from anywhere. This idea was given shape by Kleinrock when he came up with the ‘packet switching theory’ from 1961 - 1964 and created the first, small, ‘wide-area computer network’ or WAN in the year 1965. As Kleinrock, along with Lawrence G. Roberts, improvised on WAN, Roberts designed the ‘Advanced Research Projects Agency Network’ or the ARPANET.
It was during 1969 that the first ‘node’ was set up at the University of California (UCLA) and the second ‘node’ was set up at the Stanford Research Institute a month after that to initiate the first ever ‘Host-to-Host’ signal to be delivered over the Internet! As more and more nodes started being added to the ARPANET, protocols began to be developed and software were written. Rapid growth of the ARPANET was seen in the 1970s though the Internet had yet to reach the masses. Once the TCP/IP protocol was developed in 1982, the Internet became faster and less expensive to use and allowed for the growth of several Internet websites and users.
By 1993, when the first commercial web-browser ‘Mosaic’ was launched, the Internet was reborn to become the best source of information and knowledge for people the world over.
A Brief History Of Search Engines
The world’s first ever search engine was ‘Archie,’ a name derived from the word ‘archive,’ and it was developed by Emtage, Heelan, and Deutsch, in Montreal In 1990. Archie worked on FTP but, the search system was rudimentary and archiving without a clearly defined method. Then in 1992, Foster and Barrie from the University of Nevada came out with a Gopher search engine called ‘Veronica.’ which stood for "Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index to Computer Archives". Veronica was a huge technical improvement on Archive as it could index fill title of any document as well as successfully connect the user to the source file directly. However, both Archie and Veronica lacked ‘semantic ability.’
1993 witnessed the development of the first search robot called ‘the wanderer’ and the database was called ‘wandex.’ However, soon new and technologically advanced robots were written like Galaxy, Lycos and WebCrawler that indexed pages more systematically. 1994 was the year of Yahoo! followed by AltaVista, Excite, HotBot, Ask Jeeves etc. In 1998, Google, the current big daddy of search engines, was released; revolutionizing the way search was conducted over the Internet.