All Search Engines History Timeline – Infographic

Search Engines have come a long way since their inception. This articles tries to highlight some of the major milestones in the history of search engines in chronological order.

It all started with Archie, the world’s first search engine made in late 1989 and after 30 years, it is Google ruling the world. Between these periods, approximately 30 search engines came but none could be as successful and popular as Google. Search Engine Journal shares this interesting timeline picture displaying the history on search engines. Let us look at some of the major milestone from this time line history:

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1969 – The very first version of Internet came into existence in 1969 when online APRAnet connected American universities.

1989 – “The Archie Search Engine” – Considered as grandfather of all search engines as it is Internet’s first indexer. Before this there was no way people could discover useful websites or search for some content. Information used to flow in form of websites names in email messages or through word-to-mouth publicity.

1993 – World Wide Web Wanderer, the first bot to capture actual URL’s and build a database named Wandex for search engines.

1993 again – ALIWEB, World’s first search engine came into highlight.

1994 – YAHOO! Created by Stanford University students Jerry Wang and David Filo. YAHOO was abbreviated for YET ANOTHER OFFICIAL ORACLE HIERARCHY. It was originally a directory of interesting sites and bookmark list.

1994 – Lycos, Another search engine, which gain much popularity in 90’s.

1995 – Excite,AltaVista and AskJeeves search engines came later but did not perform well.

1996 – BACKRUB (The original project behind Google Search Algorithm). Sergey Brin and Larry Page, two Stanford University students created new search engine, where they ranked websites based on back links it received.

1997 – BackRub got renamed to GOOGLE. They got the name from the word Googol, which is a mathematical term for the number represented by numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros. [More Google facts].

1998 – MSN Search launched with the help of Inktomi search engine.

1998 – GoTo.com started advertising on its search page. An advertiser has to bid for top placements in search results and when user clicks on them, advertisers pay to GoTo.com.

2000 – Google Adwords launched taking inspiration from GoTo. Advertisers have to bid for keywords and when a user search for these keywords, sponsored listings appear above the Google results. Now, whenever this user clicks on these ads they have to pay Google some predefined amount.

2000 – Yahoo started to use Google Search algo in its result page.

2003 – Yahoo acquired Intomi, Goto, Altavista and AllTheWeb to power up its search capacities.

2004 – Yahoo started to use its own search engine based on acquired technologies.

2006 – MSN Search got renamed to Windows Live Search.

2009 – Live Search got renovated as Bing with all new search technology. Bing represented the sound made during “moment of discovery and decision making”

Yahoo and Microsoft are now competing together with Google. Now, they have 26.4% of market share as compared to 70.24% of Google. This means that 7 out of 10 people trust Google and Google is continuously set to increase this number with the help of other services like Gmail, Google docs, Feed Reader. More ever, there is Google caffeine search engine and Panda update which will deliver search results with more accuracy and in less time. However, it is still undergoing testing and suppose will be launched in near future.