by Lorelei Cohen

Created on: August 03, 2007   Last Updated: January 06, 2012

Search engine ingenuity actually began long before the World Wide Web even came into existence. The concept of creating a data base of information came glaringly to light with the publishing of an article back in 1945 entitled "We May Think" written by Vannaver Bush. In this article he encouraged scientists to work together to develop a knowledge based system of information for the entire world to share.

"He then proposed the idea of a virtually limitless, fast, reliable, extensible, associative memory storage and retrieval system. He named this device a memex." as is stated in Search Engine History published by Aaron Wall. Vannevar's ideas are regarded to have influenced the development of many aspects of computers, the internet and the World Wide Web as we now know it. His influence is still present in today's technology based research laboratories.

Another great breakthrough in search optimization came in the 1960s when Gerard Salton, who was very interested in the basic processes of language especially those of information retrieval, along with his research teams developed an information retrieval system known as SMART (Salton's Magic Automatic Retriever of Text).

This system changed the full-text processing methods of computers and was then, and for years to come, the most advanced system of data recovery available. His SMART system became the backbone from which many of the following information recovery systems grew. His system is still used in experimental studies even today and his name remains permanently linked to the advancement of research into information recovery.

It was in 1990 that the first search engine came into being. Alan Emtage, a student at McGill University in Montreal was the creator of Archie, its name came from the word "Archive" minus the V. Archie created a searchable database of file names, however it did not allow access to the content of these same files, and so it remained just a system that allowed the searcher to pinpoint the location of files.

In 1991 new developments in search engine optimization were once again to come from McGill University. This time led by Mark McCahill, a new program named Gopher was being developed, this being a search engine whereby a user would instruct the system to "go for" information and the gopher would then find the hole or site where this information was stored. So rather than just finding a file name, such as Archie had done, the searcher was now able to go directly to the information that

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