SEO:Search Engine History

The first Web search engine was "Wandex", a now-defunct index collected by the World Wide Web Wanderer, a web crawler developed by Matthew Gray at MIT in 1993. Another very early search engine, Aliweb, also appeared in 1993, and still runs today. The first "full text" crawler-based search engine was WebCrawler, which came out in 1994. Unlike its predecessors, it let users search for any word in any web page, which became the standard for all major search engines since. It was also the first one to be widely known by the public. Also in 1994 Lycos (which started at Carnegie Mellon University) came out, and became a major commercial endeavor.

Soon after, many search engines appeared and vied for popularity. These included Excite, Infoseek, Inktomi, Northern Light, and AltaVista. In some ways, they competed with popular directories such as Yahoo!. Later, the directories integrated or added on search engine technology for greater functionality.

Search engines were also known as some of the brightest stars in the Internet investing frenzy that occurred in the late 1990s. Several companies entered the market spectacularly, recording record gains during their initial public offerings. Some have taken down their public search engine, and are marketing enterprise-only editions, such as Northern Light.

Before the advent of the Web, there were search engines for other protocols or uses, such as the Archie search engine for anonymous FTP sites and the Veronica search engine for the Gopher protocol.

Search Engine Timeline

note: "Launch" refers only to web

availability of original crawl-based

web search engine results.

Year Engine Event

1993 Aliweb Launch

1994 WebCrawler Launch

1994 Infoseek Launch

1994 Lycos Launch

1995 AltaVista Launch (part of DEC)

1995 Excite Launch

1996 Dogpile Launch

1996 Inktomi Founded

1996 Ask Jeeves Founded

1997 Northern Light Launch

1998 Google Launch

1999 AlltheWeb Launch

2000 Teoma Founded

2003 Objects Search Launch

2004 Yahoo! Search Final launch

(first original results)

2004 MSN Search Beta launch

2005 MSN Search Final launch

2006 Quaero Founded

2006 Blorby Launch ..

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