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Please see https://github.com/davidshq/mostly-wrong-history-search-engines for latest updates

B. A History of Web Search

We've found it difficult to find a comprehensive source of information on the history of search engines. This is our endeavor to provide such a source, however it is in its very early stages and will be updated over time.

[The material below is primarily sourced from Wikipedia and supplemented with Aaron Wall's Search Engine History.]

1990-1999

  • 1992 - Tim Berners-Lee found the The WWW Virtual Library (VLib), an early web directory.
    • It was curated by a group of experts in their respective fields.
  • 1993 - May - O'Reilly Media launches Global Network Navigator (GNN), a web directory.
    • 1996 - AOL acquires and closes GNN.
  • 1993 - June - Graham Spencer, Joe Kraus, Mark VanHaren, Ryan McIntyre, Ben Lutch, and Martin Reinfried work on Architext which will eventually become the search engine Excite.
  • 1993 - September - Oscar Nierstrasz creates the first web search engine, W3Catalog.
    • Used existing lists of websites, did not crawl. Was too aggressive in its accessing of sites and caused performance slowdowns.
  • 1993 - October/November - Martijn Koster creates Aliweb.
    • No crawler, requires sites to be submitted to the engine for inclusion.
  • 1993 - December - Jonathan Fletcher creates JumpStation which utilizes a crawler, indexer, and search interface - the three components that make up modern web search.
    • 1994 - Unable to secure funds for the search engine, development is discontinued.
  • 1994 - January - EINet Galaxy, a web directory, launches.
  • 1994 - January - Jerry Yang and David Filo co-found Yahoo Directory.
    • Includes human created descriptions of each site.
    • 1995 - Yahoo Search is launched, allows searching of the directory, does not utilize a crawler.
  • 1994 - January - Infoseek, founded by Steve Kirsch launches.
    • 1995 - Netscape makes Infoseek the default search engine in their browser.
    • 1999 - Disney acquires Infoseek.
    • 2001 - Disney closes Infoseek.
  • 1994 - February - Martijn Koster proposes the Robots Exclusion Standard.
  • 1994 - March - Oliver McBryan's World-Wide Web Worm is released.
    • Supports use of regular expressions in queries.
    • 1997 - Acquired by GoTo.com.
  • 1994 - April - Brian Pinkerton's WebCrawler is released.
    • Allows querying to return results from the full-text of pages.
    • 1995 - AOL acquires WebCrawler.
    • 1997 - Excite acquires WebCrawler from AOL.
    • 2001 - Excite changes WebCrawler from using its own engine to pulling Excite's results.
  • 1994 - July - Michael Loren Mauldin's Lycos is released.
    • Offered prefix matching and word proximity in ranking.
    • Origins at Carnegie Mellon University.
    • 2001 - Lycos switches from internal search index to using Fast.
  • 1995 - Microsoft releases MSN.
  • 1995 - MetaCrawler launches.
    • Created by Aaron Collins and Oren Etzioni at University of Washington.
    • 2000 - Acquired by InfoSpace.
    • 2014 - Is merged with Zoo.
    • 2017 - Relaunches as own search engine.
  • 1995 - LookSmart is released as a web directory.
    • Founded by Evan Thornley and Tracy Ellery.
    • 1999 - Microsoft agrees to use LookSmart results for five years.
    • 2000 - Both Juno Online Services and AltaVista begin using LookSmart.
    • 2000 - October - LookSmart acquires Zeal, a web directory.
    • 2002 - LookSmart begins charging per click for sites in its directory, rapidly loses popularity.
    • 2002 - LookSmart acquires WiseNut, a search engine.
    • 2003 - October - Microsoft will not renew its agreement with LookSmart.
  • 1995 - October - Excite officially launches.
    • 2001 - October - Excite files for bankruptcy, InfoSpace will eventually acquire Excite.
  • 1995 - December - Altavista is launched.
    • Allows natural language queries, ability to add/delete one's own sites within 24 hours.
    • 2013 - Yahoo closes AltaVista.
  • 1996 - Robin Li create the RankDex site-scoring algorithm.
    • It used hyperlinks to rank sites.
  • 1996 - March - Naveen Jain founds InfoSpace.
  • 1996 - Excite acquires Magellan.
  • 1996 - Dogpile launches as a meta search engine.
  • 1996 - January-March - Larry Page and Sergey Brin begin work on Google's predecessor, BackRub.
    • 1998 - Google search becomes available at google.com.
  • 1996 - May - Wired releases its HotBot search engine.
  • 1996 - October - Gary Culliss and Steven Yang work at MIT on a "popularity engine" which becomes Direct Hit Technologies search engine.
    • Uses previous search selection stats to determine rank.
    • 1998 - August - Direct Hit Technologies releases their search engine.
  • 1996 - MetaGer is lanched.
  • 1997 - FAST is founded, Arne Halaas and John M. Lervik are two of the core contributors, the latter becomes CEO.
    • 2003 - FAST sells its search related business to Overture.
  • 1997 - April - Ask Jeeves (Ask.com) is released.
    • Uses natural language for queries, ranks links by popularity.
    • Also used human editors to improve search rsults.
    • 2005 - March - IAC acquires Ask Jeeves.
  • 1997 - September - Arkady Volozh and Ilya Segalovich launch Yandex, a Russion search engine.
  • 1998 - Jan-Willem Tusveld launches Vinden.nl, internationally will become ZapMeta.
  • 1998 - Bill Gross launches GoTo, which will become Overture.
    • 2003 - Yahoo buys Overture.
  • 1998 - David Bodnick founds Ixquick.
    • 2016 - Ixquick is merged with Startpage, a sibling project.
  • 1998 - June - Rich Skrenta and Bob Truel launch Gnuhoo which is later named the Open Director Project/DMoZ.
    • Run by volunteers.
    • 1998 - November - Netscape acquires ODP/DMoZ.
  • 1998 - July-September - MSN Search launches.
    • Uses Inktomi for its results, eventually changes name to Bing.
  • 1998 - Looksmart acquires Zeal, a web directory.
  • 1999 - May - Tor Egge launches AlltheWeb.
  • 1999 - Bo Shu and Subhash Kak launch meta search engine Anvish.
    • Later merged with Solosearch.
  • 1999 - Entireweb launches.
  • 1999 - Doug Cutting writes Lucene, a popular open source search engine.
    • 2001 - Lucene joins Apache Software Foundation.
    • 2005 - Lucene becomes top-level project at Apache.
    • 2010 - Apache Solr becomes a sub-project of Lucene.

2000-2009

  • 2000 - Francois Bourdoncle and Patrice Bertin found Exalead.
  • 2000 - OpenCOLA, distributed search engine, launches.
  • 2000 - April - Gene Kan and Steve Waterhouse launch InfraSearch, a distributed search engine.
    • It is acquired by Sun Microsystems.
  • 2000 - Matt Wells founds Gigablast.
  • 2000 - January - Robin Li and Li Hanyong launch Baidu, a Chinese search engine.
  • 2000 - Google launches AdWords and Google Toolbar.
  • 2000 - Teoma search engine is released.
    • Uses clustering to determine subject specific popularity.
  • 2001 - Ask Jeeves acquires Teoma.
  • 2001 - May - Magellan is closed down.
  • 2003 - December - Michael Christen launches what will eventually become YaCy, a distributed search engine.
  • 2003 - Amazon launches A9.com.
    • The technology behind Amazon.com
    • 2004 - A9 launches a web search engine.
    • 2008 - Web Search Engine is discontinued.
  • 2002 - Zoeken.nl is launched, internationally will become ZapMeta.
  • 2003 - Google launches AdSense.
  • 2003 - Overture Services buys AltaVista and AlltheWeb.
  • 2003 - Yahoo begins using its own crawler (Yahoo Slurp).
    • Previously, Yahoo! was using Google.
    • 2003 - Yahoo acquires Inktomi.
  • 2003 - Doug Cutting and Mike Cafarella create Nutch, a popular open source web crawler.
    • From this will come MapReduce and Hadoop.
    • 2005 - Nutch joins Apache Incubator.
    • 2010 - Nutch becomes top level project at Apache Software Foundation.
    • 2014 - Common Crawl begins using Nutch for its crawls.
  • 2004 - Marc Smith at the Sussex Innovation Centre launches Mojeek.
  • 2004 - Vivisimo launches Clusty.
    • Started at Carnegie Mellon University.
    • IBM acquires Clusty.
    • 2010 - Clusty sold again to company now named Yippy.
  • 2004 - Ask Jeeves acquires Interactive Search Holdings.
  • 2004 - iZito becomes the international version of Vinden/Zoeken.
  • 2004 - December - Google Suggest becomes a Google Labs feature.
  • 2004 - 2005 - MSN Search begins using its own indexer and crawler.
    • Previously, MSN was powered by LookSmart and Inktomi.
  • 2005 - ZapMeta becomes another international version of Vinden/Zoeken.
  • 2005 - January - nofollow attribute for links is introduced by Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft to reduce spam.
  • 2005 - Wolf Garbe launches Faroo, a distributed search engine.
  • 2005 - October - Bill Gross launches Snap.
    • Offered detailed display of search volume.
    • Had sophisticated auto-completion, related terms surfacing.
  • 2005 - December - Yahoo buys Del.icio.us.
  • 2006 - Looksmart closes Zeal.
  • 2006 - Powerset (co-founded by Barney Pell, Steve Newcomb, Lorenzo Thione) is developing a natural language search engine, it was based on research from Xerox PARC.
    • 2008 - July - Microsoft acquires Powerset.
  • 2007 - Sundar Kundayam launches Zakta, a collaborative search engine.
    • As of 12/2019 the original Zakta collaborative search (now known as zGuides) is down "for maintenance."
    • Zakta Marketing is a paid offering.
  • 2007 - December - Wikia Search becomes available in private pre-alpha.
    • 2009 - May - Wikia Search closes.
  • 2008 - Google launches SearchWiki.
    • 2010 - Google shuts down SearchWiki.
  • 2008 - January - Cuil is launched.
    • 2010 - September - Cuil closes.
  • 2008 - September - DuckDuckGo launches.
    • Privacy-centric.
  • 2009 - June - Microsoft launches Bing.
  • 2009 - December - Ecosia launches.

2010-2019

  • 2010 - September - Google launches Google Instant.
  • 2010 - November - Blekko launches.
    • Uses slashtags to allow searches to filter results.
    • 2015 - IBM acquires Blekko and shuts it down.
  • 2011 - Launch of SearchTeam, a collaborative search engine from Zakta.
    • Does not appear fully functional as of 12/2019.
  • 2011 - June - Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft announced Schema.org.
    • Supports additional tags that sites can use to convey information to engines better.
  • 2012 - January - Google launches Search Plus Your World which integrates social data into one's query results.
  • 2012 - May - Microsoft adds social data functionality to Bing.
  • 2013 - July - Jean-Manuel Rozan, Eric Leandri, and Patrick Constant's Qwant is launched.
  • 2012 - May - Google releases Knowledge Graph.
  • 2014 - Yahoo closes Yahoo! Directory.
  • 2017 - March - ODP/DMoZ is shut down.

Bibliography

We've attempted to be somewhat comprehensive in our bibliography. Resources we found particularly helpful are marked with an *.

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