The rapid growth of the World Wide Web in the early 1990's created the need for a searching facility to assist the navigation between web pages. A lot of companies recognised the potential to capitalise on this gap in the market, but only a few of them stood out and emerged as search engine giants on the turn of the century.



The first piece of software to implement the idea of a search engine was Archie, created at McGill University in Montreal in 1990. It enabled the user to search for a page in the pre-web Internet. A lot has changed since that time, with Google being one of the IT giants of our time. Let's take a closer look.

Gopher-Veronica-Jughead: Veronica and Jughead were the first web search engines, and both sent files via Gopher, a file transfer system also developed at the University of Minnesota. Veronica was very similar to Archie, but was created for plain text files. It was developed by the University of Nevada's System Computing Services. Jughead was University of Minnesota's answer to Veronica.

Lycos: Developed at the Carnegie Mellon University in 1994. It was the biggest search engine of its time. It experienced rapid growth within its first year and went on to become the most popular search engine according to Netscape for producing the most results for the search term ?surf?.

Ask Jeeves: The first search engine to enable natural language queries, such as "Who is the world's richest man?". This was achieved by using human editors to simplify the queries. It was launched in 1997 and is still active under the name Ask since 2006.

Hotbot: the search engine of the Inktomi Corporation. Became hugely popular, and pioneered the paid inclusion model, but couldn't compete with Overture's pay-per-click model and was sold to Yahoo! in 2003.

Overture: the first search engine to implement the pay-per-click model that is still widely used today. It was very successful but could not compete with Google, and was sold to Yahoo! in 2003, just like its rival, Hotbot.

Google, Yahoo!, and MSN are widely recognised as the three biggest search engines today, with Google serving nearly 50% of all web searches, and Yahoo! serving about 25%. MSN has a share of less than 10%, so we can see that there is a very big divergence, with Google emerging as the web searching superpower of our time. Google's popularity was significantly enhanced by its collaboration with AOL, as well as the growth of its brand. It is also the default search engine for Mozilla Firefox and Opera, the second and third most popular web browsers today. MSN may be the default search engine of Microsoft's Internet Explorer, the clear winner in the web browser war, but cannot compete with Google's dominant position.

Web searching is a growing industry which promises to remain lucrative for the foreseeable future. New algorithms are being developed constantly and new marketing techniques are being applied to boost each company's position in the web search war, but Google has definitely secured itself at the top.