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Best Web Search
Engine
From Wikipedia, the
free encyclopedia
A Web search
engine is a search engine designed
to search for information on the
World Wide Web. Information may
consist of web pages, images and
other types of files. Some search
engines also mine data available in
newsgroups, databases, or open
directories. Unlike Web directories,
which are maintained by human
editors, search engines operate
algorithmically or are a mixture of
algorithmic and human input.
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The very first tool
used for searching on the Internet was Archie. The name stands for
"archive" without the "vee". It was created in 1990 by Alan Emtage,
a student at McGill University in Montreal. The program downloaded
the directory listings of all the files located on public anonymous
FTP (File Transfer Protocol) sites, creating a searchable database
of file names; however, Archie did not index the contents of these
files.
The rise of Gopher (created in 1991 by Mark McCahill at the
University of Minnesota) led to two new search programs, Veronica
and Jughead. Like Archie, they searched the file names and titles
stored in Gopher index systems. Veronica (Very Easy Rodent-Oriented
Net-wide Index to Computerized Archives) provided a keyword search
of most Gopher menu titles in the entire Gopher listings. Jughead (Jonzy's
Universal Gopher Hierarchy Excavation And Display) was a tool for
obtaining menu information from specific Gopher servers. While the
name of the search engine "Archie" was not a reference to the Archie
comic book series, "Veronica" and "Jughead" are characters in the
series, thus referencing their predecessor.
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. JumpStation (released in early 1994) used a
crawler to find web pages for searching, but search was limited to
the title of web pages only. One of the first "full text"
crawler-based search engines was WebCrawler, which came out in 1994.
Unlike its predecessors, it let users search for any word in any
webpage, 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) was launched, 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. Yahoo! was among the most
popular ways for people to find web pages of interest, but its
search function operated on its web directory, rather than full-text
copies of web pages. Information seekers could also browse the
directory instead of doing a keyword-based search. |
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History of popular Web search engines
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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, receiving 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. Many search engine
companies were caught up in the dot-com bubble, a speculation-driven market
boom that peaked in 1999 and ended in 2001.
Around 2001, the Google search engine rose to prominence. The company
achieved better results for many searches with an innovation called PageRank.
This iterative algorithm ranks web pages based on the number and PageRank of
other web sites and pages that link there, on the premise that good or
desirable pages are linked to more than others. Google also maintained a
minimalist interface to its search engine. In contrast, many of its
competitors embedded a search engine in a web portal.
By 2001, Yahoo was providing search services based on Inktomi's search
engine. Yahoo! acquired Inktomi in 2002, and Overture (which owned AlltheWeb
and AltaVista) in 2003. Yahoo! switched to using Google's search engine
until 2004, when it launched its own search engine based on the combined
technologies of its acquisitions.
Microsoft first launched MSN Search (since re-branded Live Search) in the
fall of 1998 using search results from Inktomi. In early 1999 the site began
to display listings from Looksmart blended with results from Inktomi except
for a short time in 1999 when results from AltaVista were used instead. In
2004, Microsoft began a transition to its own search technology, powered by
its own web crawler (called msnbot).
As of 2007, Google is the most popular Web search engine worldwide. A number
of country-specific search engine companies have become prominent; for
example Baidu is the most popular search engine in the People's Republic of
China.
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