Trends — Search Engines — Some Background
3 Basic Parts of a Search Engine
- • The Crawl
- The "spider" program visits every URL on the Internet. The program follows all links and catalogs all the text of web pages encountered during its journeys.
- • The Index
- The index is the huge database that results from the crawl.
- • Search Software and User Interface
- The search software makes the index available to search engine users; the user interface facilitates the process.
Yahoo!
The site which became Yahoo! began on the campus of Stanford University in February 1994 when Jerry Yang and David Filo started compiling .
At this point Yahoo! was an very useful catalog of Web sites categorized by topic and subtopic. But it wasn't a search engine because it didn't crawl the Web and grab every site it encountered.
Excite
Excite also appeared in 1994, when six Stanford graduates created Architext as a text search program for corporate databases.
Lycos
Lycos began in May 1994 at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Lycos crawled the Web with more sophisticated algorithms so that its results would be more useful. John Battelle points out that Lycos "became the first major engine to use links to a Web site as the basis of relevance — the underlying basis for Google's current success." (The Search, page 53.)
Alta Vista
On December 15, 1995 Louis Monier — working at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in Palo Alto, California — launched Alta Vista, the first really good search engine. He wanted to index the entire content of the Web, not just the URLs (which was all most search engines of the time indexed). This meant that Monier had to devise a very fast way to crawl everything on the Web, so that his index would be as comprehensive as possible.
Alta Vista was the search engine during 1997. But DEC had no idea what to do with Alta Vista (because it wasn't hardware), and competition was on its way.
Alta Vista became part of Compaq in January 1998, and then was sold to CMGI in June 1999 and then in 2003 to Overture Services (launched in 1998 as GoTo.com), which later that year was itself purchased by Yahoo!
For More Information
We strongly recommend a book by John Battelle: The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture. New York: Portfolio, 2005.
See also David Vise and Mark Malseed: The Google Story. NY: Delacorte Press, 2005.
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