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A Brief History of Search Engines (Track This Article)

A search engine is an information retrieval system designed to help find information stored on a computer system. Search engines help to minimize the time required to find information and the amount of information which must be consulted, akin to other techniques for managing information overload..

A search engine is an information retrieval system that is designed to help find information stored on a ca computer system.

In 1990 the very first search engine was created by students at McGill University in Montreal. The search engine was called Archie and it was invented to index FTP archives, allowing people to quickly access specific files. FTPs (short for File Transfer Protocol) are used to transfer data from one computer to another ocer the internet, or through a network that supports TCP/IP protocol. In its early days Archie contacted a list of FTP archives approximately once a month with a request for a listing. Once Archie received a listing it was stored in local files and could be searched using a UNIX grep command. In its early days Archie was a local tool but as the kinks got worked out and it became more efficient it became a network wide resource. Archie users could utilize Archie's services through a variety of methods including e-mail queries, teleneting directly to a server, and eventually through the World Wide Web interfaces. Archie only indexed computer files.

A student at the University of Minnesota created a search engine that indexed plain text files in 1991. They named the program Gopher after the University of Minnesota's mascot.

In 1993 a student at MIT created Wandx, the first Web search engine.

Today, search engines match a user's keyword query with a list of potential websites that might have the information the users is looking for. The search engine does this by using a software code that is called a crawler to probe web pages that match the user's keyword. Once the crawler has identified web pages that may be what the user is looking for the search engine uses a variety of statistical techniques to establish each pages importance. Most search engines establish the importance of hits based on the frequency of word distribution. Once the search engine has finished searching web pages it provides a list of web sites to the user.

Today, when an internet user types a word into a search engine they are given a list of websites that might be able to provide them with the information they seek. The typical search engine provides ten potential hits per page. The average internet user never looks farther they the second page the search engine provides. Webmasters are constantly finding themselves forced to use new methods of search engine optimization to be highly ranked by the search engines.

In 2000, a study was done by Lawrence and Giles that suggested internet search engines were only able to index sixteen percent of all available webpage's.

To provide a set of matching items quickly, a search engine will typically collect metadata about the group of items under consideration beforehand through a process referred to as indexing. The index typically requires a smaller amount of computer storage, and provides a basis for the search engine to calculate item relevance. The search engine may store of copy of each item in a cache so that users can see the state of the item at the time it was indexed or for archive purposes or to make repetitive processes work more efficiently and quickly.

Notably, some search engines do not store an index. Crawler, or spider type search engines may collect and assess items at the time of the search query. Meta search engines simply reuse the index or results of one or more other search engines.

AskJeeves and Northern Light were both launched in 1997.

Google was launched in 1997 by Sergey Brin and Larry Page as part of a research project at Stanford University. It uses inbound links to rank sites. In 1998 MSN Search and the Open Directory were also started. The Open Directory, according to its Web site, "is the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors." It seeks to become the "definitive catalog of the Web." The entire directory is maintained by human input.

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