2 of 17

Write now Article Tools

Page 2 of 4

known search engines, Veronica and Jughead, searched the files stored in Gopher systems. Veronica (Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index to Computerized Archives) provided a keyword search of most Gopher menu titles in the entire Gopher listings. Jughead (Jonzy's Universal Gopher Hierarchy Excavation And Display) was a tool for obtaining menu information from various Gopher servers.

The first real Web search engine Wandex appeared in 1993. Another very early search engine, Aliweb, also appeared in 1993, and is still operational today. The first "full text" crawler-based search engine was WebCrawler, which came out in 1994. Unlike its predecessors, it let users search for any word in any webpage, which is today the standard for all major search engines. WebCrawler was also the first search engine that became very popular. Also in 1994 Lycos came out, and became the first major commercial search engine.

Soon after Lycos, many search engines were launched and competed with each other. They included: Aliweb and WebCrawler in 1993, Infoseek and Lycos in 1994, AltaVista and Excite in 1995, Dogpile, Inktomi and Ask Jeeves in 1996, Northern Light in 1997, Google, AlltheWeb, Naver, Teoma and Vivisimo in 1999, Biadu in 2000, Info.com in 2003, Yahoo! Search, MSN Search in 2004, Ask.com, AskMeNow in 2005, Ask.com, Windows Live Search in 2006, wikiseek and Tokenizer in 2007.

Search engines were also involved in a big way in the Internet investing frenzy that occurred in the late 1990s. Several companies entered the market spectacularly, receiving record gains during their initial public offerings. Some have since taken down their public search engine, and are marketing enterprise-only editions, such as Northern Light.

It is common knowledge that the search engines participated in a big way in the dot com survival during the dot com burst. Many of the Dot.coms that survived did so by understanding and utilizing Search Engine Marketing (SEM) techniques effectively. SEM has now become a mainstream Customer Relationship Management (CRM) activity, with many businesses investing million dollar sums per annum to drive the required return on their Web investment. The techniques have however changed considerably from the early search optimization, where sites used to repeat their targeted keywords thousands of times on each page or use cloaking techniques to try to spot search engines before delivering them specific content.

Today, there are four recognized techniques employed in

• << previous page
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• next page >>

Add your voice

Know something about Search engine evolution: Where they started and where they are today?
We want to hear your view. Write now!