The Evolution and Revolution of Search Engines

Search engines, where would we be without them? In the last 10-15 years, the Internet has become a major part of everyday American life. Many people today do not remember the time before this wonderful information highway we call the Internet. The Internet has truly revolutionized how people live their lives, for example, you can bank online, buy almost anything you want online, meet new people online, and even find local movie times. But one of the biggest advantages is the use of Internet search engine. At any time you have a question or a desire to learn more about a particular topic and that information can be easily reached through a search engine. In this article we will give you a brief history of the evolution of the search engine, and show you how they really have revolutionized our lifestyle.

The history of search engines is the story of university students' projects to develop into commercial enterprises and revolutionizing the field as they went. The first attempt at creating a search engine called Archie and it was created in 1990 by Alan Emtage a student at McGill University. This very primitive search engine does not use any robot technology. All Archie really was just a database of archived file names as it will try to match with user queries.

The next evolutionary step in search engine was the introduction of "bots". The first use of robotic technology was in the search engine World Wide Web Wanderer. Simply, what robots will do is scan the Internet for URL's that start at the same place and using the links in the previous site to find more places. The problems with these first robots was that if they were not written correctly, they would create too many hits on a server rotten system performance.

To combat these initial problems Martjin Koster came out with the first web directory called "Aliweb" in October 1993. Web directories are different than search engines because the sites listed in them are not from the robots, but rather from human editors reviewing sites and place them in the library.

But shortly after, in December 1993 a new robot was born. This was called "spider". Spiders added a much wider degree of accuracy by indexing the entire text of a webpage. The older robots only indexed URLs and titles on one side, which meant that some relevant keywords could not be indexed. This greatly improved relevance ranking of their results, and thus was the first major step to form the major search engines as we all become so accustomed to using today.

Not long after the spider, so we are the emergence of some big guns. In 1994 came out of Stanford University in the very famous Yahoo. The two guys who started Yahoo were students, David Filo and JerryYang. Basically, the first Yahoo was just a list of these guys' favorite sites. But soon, due to its easy user interface was the most popular web directory. Due to its sites were all human reviewed, Yahoo was only able to index about 1% of the internet. At this point, Altavista became the fastest growing search engines use spider's technology and was the index up to 10 million pages a day.

At this point there are two different types of search engines, "author controlled" such as Altavista and Excite, where the results were ranked by keyword relevancy, and "editor controlled" such as Yahoo, where people are placed manually websites in their index.

Then in late 1997 from Stanford University was born the most popular and well known search engine to date: Google Google has a different way Ranks its websites. It used a PageRank system. Simply, what they did was to rank sites higher in their results based on how many links pointing at a particular site. Of course had content on the page to be relevant to the keywords typed into the search box. But basically, Google invented what might be called a system of voting. So a site with many backlinks or votes would rank higher. A backlink is precisely when a second puts a link on their website that points to another external site. Skip forward to today, and Google has more than 80% of Internet sites in their index, which is quite impressive.

Search engines have had an enormous influence on American life. They basically will give you a little about what information you want, you have to do is type in the search box the item you want to learn more about. Humans are natural born information junkies, we always want to know more and find out more and search engines has made this desire of our extremely easy to cure. Think about it, maybe you need to create a simple problem you have with your car. By using a search engine to do some research, you can very easily figure out the problem, saving you a very expensive trip to the car repair shop. They are great teaching tools, before search engines emerged, if you really wanted to learn something, you will go to your library and check out a book. Now, before making the trip, you can find out what you would by just sitting at your desk and surfing through Google. The list goes on about the many benefits of this great new technology we call search engine. We are sure you can remember a time when you've found some very good information by using a. If you're anything like us and find yourself addicted to this easily accessible information highway then your use of them daily.

Search engines by nature were made very easy to use. But with a little extra knowledge about how they work you can really benefit from them and find great information very quickly. With the right knowledge about search engine and use of specialized tools, you can literally find anything you want. And when we mean something, we mean anything. For us personally we're excited to see what search engines will evolve in future. The sky is the limit. Who knows what type of search spiders will spawn future, but one thing is certain there will be newer and newer search technology it's just our human nature to keep trying to top ourselves.