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The last ten years

By the time the majority of those with the potential (urban "middle class" society) were almost all using the internet and the 'world wide web', Google was the market leader, and since then most 'new' search engine leaps have happened inside the google universe, for example google maps or google books or even its tenuous links to youtube, which you could perhaps call 'google pirate' since it is choc full of music and video which I don't believe average users are licensed to watch - however let's give them the benefit of the doubt.

When Google arrived on the market, it WAS the 'new leap' in searching, and before Google there is an assorted and seemingly brief history, with few genuinely revolutionary methodologies but many different ways of trying to solve the problems posed by SO MUCH DATA needing to be searched.

At that time my first port of call for any internet search was Webcrawler. Webcrawler may have been the closest precursor to Google. Whilst other search engines perhaps relied more on keyword tags and indeed submission data in order to define the entries to be searched, Webcrawler seemed to be an early attempt to do what has become Google's single most recognisable activity (from the point of view of the webmaster) - i.e. crawling through millions of pages, trying to make sense of them in advance.

Also widely used at the time were things like Lycos, Altavista and the then-very-different Ask Jeeves, which, like 'metacrawler' was scanning results across many smaller search engines and reporting them together on one page. They didn't do much filtering and in those days there was no profitability in putting generic results up, bought from Google or somebody.

So what you had was a bunch of relatively large engines, none of which were amazing, but some of which were pretty good. Then, developers in their many being the general populus of the world wide web back then (in the early nineties) there came along many smaller 'search engines' - websites where hard working webmasters had built search systems for various niche areas.

I think the bulk of the smaller entities disappeared over the last ten years, during the ascent of Google, but the development ethos behind them is WHY Google was born in the first place and why though it seems that this sort of development isn't there, it must continue, almost anonymously, and will be where the next real leap upwards comes from rather than within the confines of Google headquarters!

The origins

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