A Brief History of Search Engines: the Last 20 Years
How will the web search look in a few years time? Hard to find a pertinent answer when the last decade offered puzzled situations. The search engines’ debut started at the beginning of the 90’s with Archie, WebCrawler and Infoseek – the first to break the record of 7.3 millions visitors per month.
The first search engines have in common not only the rudimentary algorithms, but their short life span, being able to find searching results 3 years on average.
In the mid 90’ Yahoo! and MSN dominated the users’ choice over innovative search engine. The preference was due to the high relevance of the used method – Yahoo! for example, began as a collection of web pages, refined with man-made descriptions.
The search engines of that time developed new algorithms, such as natural language search, billions of pages indexed, pay-per-click strategy, or the acquirement of other smaller search directories.
That these search engines failed, Google succeeded since it’s launch in 1998. It revolutionized the search engine history by introducing the page rank technology. Since 2000 many other search engines developed and their success was relative depending on the niche they addressed. Take for example Open Directory Project DMOZ, or Exalead, SearchMe or Viewzi.
On top of the long list encroaching the available search engines, Google dominates and the prospective enhancement of it’s share market are very positive. In the second semester of 2010, Google was controlling more than 83% of the global market, being followed by Baidu – China’s most powerful search engine and Bing.
While Google plays it’s main role in the search engines environment, Bing appears to gain the interest of the Internet users – although it provides the same features as any common provider in this field, it is supported by Microsoft.
In the falling market share of Yahoo!, the most notorious search engine before Google, the latter one seems to get the most relevant results for the question: how will develop the search engines in the close future?
Mobile is surely where it’s at. We can’t wait to see what the history of that will look like 20 years from now. Oh, that rudimentary local search on Android!
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