All of us, who have an Internet based business, call search engines the big daddy of Internet marketing. Almost everyday we use search engines for one or the other reason. It won’t be wrong if we’ll say that these are the integral part of our business. But, did you ever try to find out about this search engine evolution? How these search engines have connected the globe in a single thread? Take this ‘odyssey of search’ and know the ancestors of your big daddy.

Inception

It was early 1990 when the first searching tool came to exist, it was called Archie. It is derived from archive but with a missing ‘v’. This infant search tool allowed directory listing of files located on FTP sites. It created a searchable database of filenames. Archie was followed by Gopher, a specialized text file search tool. It incorporated different search programs like Veronica and Jughead. But, these all were just search tools not proper search engines. In 1993, came the first web search engine named Wandex. In the same year came Aliweb, this is still there today. But, what about the search crawler based search engine? Here came WebCrawler, the first full text crawler based search engine, which started searching through words in webpages. After this started the era of mushrooming of search engines, which included Excite, Inktomi, Infoseek, Northern Light, and AltaVista. Many of these search engines compete with then popular directory like Yahoo!

Yahoo!

Yahoo was first started as a directory for students to categorize there favorite websites. Yahoo came to existence in 1994 and after that it became a major search engine. As per the survival of the fittest law, in 2002 Yahoo! acquired Inktomi followed by AlltheWeb and AltaVista in 2003. Though Yahoo had its own search engine but initially it used Google to provide results. In 2004, Yahoo became a full fledge search engine with its own database and transformed from a directory to a search engine.

Google

Google, now called the daddy of search engines doesn’t have even a decade long history. It started in 2001, which changed the whole process and concept of search engines. Google brought the concept of link popularity and page rank. Google provided a simple concept of word search through its crawlers or spiders. Now it enjoys the unbeatable database of search terms. Today, half the world relies on Google for their search. From cradle to grave, Google search can now provide you every single detail.

MSN

The latest addition to this race is MSN search powered by Microsoft. Microsoft started MSN beta search in 2004 power driven by its own crawlers called msnbot. Recently Microsoft started a new search platform - Windows Live Search, which is fully specialized for word searches.

Conclusion

The latest trend in search engines is the convergence of these engines. Yahoo and Google has launched there new search page called GahooYoogle (it’s easy to remember toggle the Y and G of Yahoo and Google and you can get the new search engine. This joint venture separates your search page into two screens where one part shows the Google search result and the other shows Yahoo search results. It’s quite interesting to see two giants together sharing one screen. But, indubitably Google still rules the whole search engine market and it’s really difficult for other search engines to spread their wings as major parts are covered by Google.