Brief History of Website, Search Engines & Google

The First website

World's first website, was developed by 'Timothy John Berners-Lee', (A British computer scientist at CERN) on 6th August 1991. He developed the website as an information sharing system between the scientists in universities. The address of that first created webpage was  "http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html" and you  can  still view it by clicking on this website address.

Need of Search Engines

Over the years, many more websites were developed offering many types of information for the internet users. Gradually the internet became crowded with websites; and hence came the need of a search engine to provide right information for the users, from the huge list of websites in the internet.

Search Engines- Evolution & History

From 1990 - 93, some search engine techniques were established primarily based on sorting. The sorted search lists made finding the information easier than earlier. The First search engine developed was ‘Archie’, with this primary sorting techniques.

In the year 1994, “Infoseek”, “Galaxy”, “Alsta Vista”, “Webcrawler”, “Yahoo” and “Lycose” search engines, came into picture to give more quality search results for the users. These search engines allowed natural language queries in search. “Webcrawler” introduced first crawler that indexed entire pages. “Yahoo” introduced a man-made description with each URL.  “Look Smart” was introduced in 1995. They competed with “Yahoo” by increasing inclusion rates back & forth. 

In 1996, “HotBot” and “Google” were developed. Later yahoo bought “Hotbot” (in 2003). In 1997, ‘ask.com’ and in 1998, “msn search” were launched. “MSN” was bought by “Netscape“ in 1998 and “AOL” bought “Netscape” in the same year itself.

In 1999 more advanced search engines came, ‘Overture’ and ‘All the web’.  ‘Overture’ was the first company who successfully provided ‘pay-per-click’ placement search service. ‘Overture’ bought ‘Alta vista’ & ‘All the web’; and later in 2003, yahoo acquired “Overture”.

In 2005, “Overture” owner introduced new search engine ‘Snap’. But it was too complicated and could not succeed as expected. In 2006, ‘Microsoft' introduced ‘Live Search’ and in 2009; rebranded it as ‘Bing’ which is a familiar search engine today. In 2008 former Google employees developed “Cuil” search engine as a competitor for ‘Google’. But ‘Cuil’ failed to give accurate results and the response time was slow. Gradually “Cuil” became a failure and is dead now!

The Search Engine Giant - Google's History

Though Google was developed in January 1996, It was initially named as ‘Backrub’. ‘Larry Page’ and ‘Sergey Brin’ worked on it and launched it as ‘Google’ search engine in 1998.  

In 1999, Google got funding from few investors and ‘AOL’ selected ‘Google’ as the search partner. In 2000, yahoo also selected Google as their search partner. Google introduced ‘Google Toolbar’ and relaunched ‘Adwords’ to sell ads on CPM basis. In 2002, ‘AOL’ used Google to deliver search related ads and in 2003 Google launched ‘adsense’ to sell targeted ads on other websites. 

Over years, Google became the most popular search engine on internet. Their unique and improving algorithm has made them to succeed and get trust over other search engines.

Raji Pramod