Search engine
| Timeline (full list) | ||
|---|---|---|
| Year | Engine | Current status |
| 1993 | W3Catalog | Inactive |
| Aliweb | Inactive | |
| JumpStation | Inactive | |
| WWW Worm | Inactive | |
| 1994 | WebCrawler | Active, Aggregator |
| Go.com | Inactive, redirects to Disney | |
| Lycos | Active | |
| Infoseek | Inactive | |
| 1995 | AltaVista | Inactive, redirected to Yahoo! |
| Daum | Active | |
| Magellan | Inactive | |
| Excite | Active | |
| SAPO | Active | |
| Yahoo! | Active, Launched as a directory | |
| 1996 | Dogpile | Active, Aggregator |
| Inktomi | Inactive, acquired by Yahoo! | |
| HotBot | Active (lycos.com) | |
| Ask Jeeves | Active (rebranded ask.com) | |
| 1997 | Northern Light | Inactive |
| Yandex | Active | |
| 1998 | Active | |
| Ixquick | Active also as Startpage | |
| MSN Search | Active as Bing | |
| empas | Inactive (merged with NATE) | |
| 1999 | AlltheWeb | Inactive (URL redirected to Yahoo!) |
| GenieKnows | Active, rebranded Yellowee.com | |
| Naver | Active | |
| Teoma | Inactive, redirects to Ask.com | |
| Vivisimo | Inactive | |
| 2000 | Baidu | Active |
| Exalead | Active | |
| Gigablast | Active | |
| 2001 | Kartoo | Inactive |
| 2003 | Info.com | Active |
| Scroogle | Inactive | |
| 2004 | Yahoo! Search | Active, Launched own web search (see Yahoo! Directory, 1995) |
| A9.com | Inactive | |
| Sogou | Active | |
| 2005 | AOL Search | Active |
| GoodSearch | Active | |
| SearchMe | Inactive | |
| 2006 | Soso | Active |
| Quaero | Inactive | |
| Search.com | Active | |
| ChaCha | Active | |
| Ask.com | Active | |
| Live Search | Active as Bing, Launched as rebranded MSN Search |
|
| 2007 | Inactive | |
| Sproose | Inactive | |
| Inactive | ||
| Blackle.com | Active, Google Search | |
| 2008 | Powerset | Inactive (redirects to Bing) |
| Picollator | Inactive | |
| Viewzi | Inactive | |
| Boogami | Inactive | |
| LeapFish | Inactive | |
| Forestle | Inactive (redirects to Ecosia) | |
| DuckDuckGo | Active | |
| 2009 | Bing | Active, Launched as rebranded Live Search |
| Yebol | Inactive | |
| Mugurdy | Inactive due to a lack of funding | |
| Scout (Goby) | Active | |
| NATE | Active | |
| 2010 | Blekko | Inactive, sold to IBM |
| Cuil | Inactive | |
| Yandex (English) | Active | |
| 2011 | YaCy | Active, P2P web search engine |
| 2012 | Volunia | Inactive |
| 2013 | Qwant | Active |
| Coc Coc | Active, Vietnamese search engine | |
| Egerin | Active, Kurdish / Sorani search engine | |
A web search engine is a software system that is designed to search for information on the World Wide Web. The search results are generally presented in a line of results often referred to as search engine results pages (SERPs). The information may be a mix of web pages, images, and other types of files. Some search engines also mine data available in databases or open directories. Unlike web directories, which are maintained only by human editors, search engines also maintain real-time information by running an algorithm on a web crawler.
Internet search engines themselves predate the debut of the Web in December 1990. The Who is user search dates back to 1982 and the Knowbot Information Service multi-network user search was first implemented in 1989. The first well documented search engine that searched content files, namely FTP files was Archie, which debuted on 10 September 1990.
Prior to September 1993 the World Wide Web was entirely indexed by hand. There was a list of webservers edited by Tim Berners-Lee and hosted on the CERN webserver. One historical snapshot of the list in 1992 remains, but as more and more web servers went online the central list could no longer keep up. On the NCSA site, new servers were announced under the title "What's New!"
The first tool used for searching content (as opposed to users) on the Internet was Archie. The name stands for "archive" without the "v". It was created by Alan Emtage, Bill Heelan and J. Peter Deutsch, computer science students at McGill University in Montreal. The program downloaded the directory listings of all the files located on public anonymous FTP () sites, creating a searchable database of file names; however, Archie Search Engine did not index the contents of these sites since the amount of data was so limited it could be readily searched manually.
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Wikipedia