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Web search

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 Google 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

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