Search Engines
A search engine is defined in the webopedia as
"A program that searches documents for specified keywords and returns a list of documents where the keywords were found."
On the history of search engines, the webopedia article says:
"The first tool for searching the Internet, created in 1990, was called "Archie." It downloaded directory listings of all files located on anonymous FTP servers; creating a searchable database of filenames. A year later "Gopher" was created. It indexed plain text documents. "Veronica" and "Jughead" came along to search Gopher's index systems. The first actual Web search engine was developed by Matthew Gray in 1993 and was called "Wandex." [source]"
Organisations involved in the early development of search engines included Lycos [wikipedia article].
Search engines may be either Crawler (or robot) based -- using automated software agents called crawlers -- Human powered or hybrid. In all three, when you query a search engine, you are actually searching through collected databases of stored information. This is why commercial search engines sometimes return results which are dead links.
Early search engines made use of meta tags in the html heads of documents. Owing to the fact that irrelevant tags could be introduced, the practice is virtually abandoned today. The article "Death of a Meta Tag" at searchenginewatch.com gives a detailed account of the history. The D-zine article "Search Engine Tips" gives some useful practical information.
Some Corporate Information
Yahoo! (http://docs.yahoo.com/info/misc/history.html) began as a student hobby. Its two founders David Filo and Jerry Yang, as Ph.D. students at Stanford University collected lists of Internet links, organised them into categories and subcategories, and finally published their organised database as a web site. Yahoo! was incorporated in March 1995.
Altavista (http://www.altavista.com) originated as a project at Digital Equipment Corporation's Palo Alto Laboratory during the spring of 1995 to index the entire Internet. They created Internet's first Web index and introduced advanced search features including language recognition.
Google was founded in late 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin who met as students in Stanford in 1995. The Google search engine makes use of page ranking and relevancy formulas, which were the innovation of Google itself and are described in Page and Brin's document in the 7th WWW Conference (1998). A partnership between Google and Yahoo! was forged in 2000.
Further Reading
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