About Online Search
History of Search
History of Internet
The first Internet Search Engine: AOL
AltaVista
Lycos
Excite
Yahoo and Google
Online Search Engines have taken the same course of action as the computer. Xerox Corp invented the computer, however it was Apple, IBM and Microsoft who have mastered it.
History of Search
In the late 19th century Melvil Dewey introduced a universal classification system to identify books using numeric coding. The Dewey decimal system has been updated many times, and is used in libraries today, however it is unable to cope with the size of the world wide web.
Information Retrieval has developed considerably from the 1940s. Gerard Salton, mathematician graduate of Harvard developed what is considered to be the first digital search engine, SMART, in the late 1960s.
History of Internet
The DARPA network (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) of 1966/67 is widely known as the fore-runner of the World Wide Web. It was a communication system developed by the American Military. It had the ability to pass information from base to base easily. The universities in America then joined the network and the files that were accessed at each location had to be ordered, hence the .com suffix to web addresses (for .communications).
Google is widely seen as the best web based search engine available in the new millennium, and Yahoo! MSN and Miva also have a fair share of traffic. However, we could quite easily be using Excite instead of Google, had they not made the wrong decisions.
The first Internet Search Engine: AOL
The honour of being the first internet search engine goes to Archie, a pre-web application created in 1990. It was an internet based archive which built an index of each file it found. This was the first FTP (File Transfer Protocol).
Between 1993 and 1996, the World Wide Web grew from 130 sites to more than 600,000. The web was growing faster than any human could track. Keeping up to date with the growing number of sites was something a machine could do, hence WebCrawler was created by Brian Pinkerton at the University of Washington.
From the results database, WebCrawler ranked the sites with the most relevance. By November 1994, WebCrawler had received it's one-millionth search query. In June 1995, AOL (America Online) had no web-related assets and acquired WebCrawler for $1million.
AltaVista
In 1994, Yahoo was just a great catalog of results, but had no search function. The First Truly Good Search Engine was developed by a computer hardware company called Digital Equipment Corp. They wanted to develop a search engine that would show off the power of their Alpha computer - hence the birth of AltaVista, invented by Louis Monier. In 1996 it was arguably the best search engine on the web.
Search today works on the same three principles that were adopted at AltaVista. First is the crawler (or spider), the second is the database of results, and third is the software interface (how to rank and present results).
In December 1995, after amassing more than 16 million documents on the web, public access was given to altavista.digital.com. On the first public day, AltaVista served nearly 300,000 visits, and within the first year more than 4 billion search queries.
By 1997, AltaVista was set to make $50 million in sponsorship revenues and was in a three way heat with Yahoo and AOL as the most important destination on the web.
DEC was sold with AltaVista to Compaq for $9.6 billion in January 1998, and AltaVista was sold separately in June 1999 to CMGI for $2.3 billion. In 1999, CMGI spent $120 million on marketing AltaVista, as they thought that AltaVista was a get rich quick engine. However, in March 2000 the NASDAQ peaked and then began its historic slide. AltaVista limped through it and was sold to Overture in 2003 for only $140 million.
Lycos
Lycos was created in 1994 by Dr. Michael Maulden of Carnegie Mellon University and was named after Lycosidae, the Latin word for the wolf spider family, which actively seeks their prey rather than catch it in their web. It too, followed the same fate as AltaVista. It used a spider to source websites; however it was the first engine to use website links as the basis for relevance.
Lycos was the first engine also to display web page summaries in search results, rather than a simple list of links.
Lycos' major investor was CMGI and the company proceeded to go the same route as AltaVista. In 1999, Lycos briefly became the most popular online destination in the world. In May 2000, Lycos was sold to Terra for $12.5 billion. Four years later it was sold to a South Korean Company for only $100 million. Today Lycos remains a top-twenty destination, however has failed to reproduce its past glories.
Excite
If Excite had taken the opportunity to buy Google, the world of search may well be a totally different place. The acquisition never took place, and Excite eventually failed.
Founded in 1994 for by six Stanford graduates, Excite began under the name Architext. The main aim of Excite was to create search technology for large databases within corporations, however focused changed to the consumer web after investment of $1.5 million by Vinod Khosla.
Khosla tried to get Yahoo and Excite to merge, however Yahoo wanted none of it. Khosla then looked at Lycos for $1 million however the Excite founders thought they new best and Khosla couldn't persuade the founders in such a move.
Excite was the first engine to launch in 1995 which used a statistical analysis based algorithm to assess content as well as links. It went public in April 1996 in an attempt to get more traffic. It bought WebCrawler from AOL for $4.3 million. Excite was revolutionary in its ideas; allowing users to create custom Web pages and the first portal to allow free email.
Excite played a major role in what was known as the great search scrum of 1998.
Excite was very close to partnering with Yahoo, however a broadband company called @Home offered more money. Excite excepted, thinking it could combine high speed internet access with quality content. However, there were complications. @Home was owned by AT&T, and they decided they wanted to get out of the media business. This killed Excite.
Excite was sold in 2002 to Interactive Search Holdings, and then to Ask Jeeves in March 2004.
Yahoo and Google
There was a giant vacuum in the search market after the NASDAQ crash, which was filled first by Yahoo, and later by Google. By 2002 Yahoo, Google and MSN were head and shoulders above the other engines for traffic volume, and that remains to this day. The history of Google, Yahoo and MSN is described in the About pages.
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