Other Search Engines

It was the year 1990 something and the Internet was coming forth with a purpose and that purpose was to put information out there.  But it was hard to find that information. We talked about Google here. But what was it like before Google?

Before Google

Some people reading this will never know the world without Google, but others will remember the ones that came before Google took over the world. You had a mixture of different ones from different years. Here is a timeline of search engines.

Timeline

• 1990
  • Archie Query Form
    • The first search engine and it searched FTP sites
• 1991
  • World Wide Web Virtual Library (VLiB)
    • Tim Berners-lee set up a Virtual Library
• 1992
  • Veronica
    • Search file names and titles stored in the Gopher Index systems
• 1993
  • Jughead
    • Search file name titles in the Gopher index systems.
  • World Wide Web Wanderer
    • This was a Bot that counted active web servers and measured the growth of the Internet
  • Primitive Web Search
    • Jump Station
      • Found the page titles and header
    • World wide webworm
      • Indexed titles and URLs
    • RBSE Spider
• 1994
  • Infoseek
    • Webmasters could submit a page in real-time
  • ELNet Galaxy
    • Very Efficient in the utilization of different web search features
  • Aliweb
    • This crawled meta info and allowed the users to submit pages to be indexed.
    • Most people didn’t know how to submit their pages or sites
  • Yahoo Search
    • Had a manmade description with URL
    • Long wait time to be added
    • If you were a commercial site you needed to pay $300 a year
    • Informational sites were free
  • WebCrawler
    • You couldn’t use this in the day time as it was too popular as it crawled entire pages
  • Lycos
    • Went public with 54,000 documents
    • By August of 1994, they had identified 394,000 documents and over a million by 1995
• 1995
  • Look Smart
  • Excite
  • Altavista
    • Unlimited bandwidth
    • Add or delete your own URL within 24 hours
• 1996
  • BackRub
    • Google beginning
  • Inktomi: Hotbot
  • Ask Jeeves
    • Used clustering to organize sites by subject
    • I used this one
• 1998
  • MSN
  • Google
  • Overture
    • First to provide pay-per-click
  • Alltheweb

That is the time of the 1990’s search engines for the thing called the world wide web.

Summary

I did use a few of these search engines during the ’90s. But Google came in and now is the king of the information superhighway.

Citation

I found the timeline information on wordstream.com