Internet is a spectrum of ideas and information. Searching the net for the right webpage can be a cumbersome task. Search engines explore the Internet on the basis of the keywords or a combination of words that are present in different websites. These search engines maintain an index of words that help them easily locate a website. Search engines have become an integral part of an Internet user.
The earlier versions of search engines indexed only a few thousands of pages. With the advent in technology, the search engines have become more compatible with Web pages to such an extent that they can list any site by using different permutation and combination of words. It can even respond to millions of queries in a day.
How does a Search Engine Work?
Internet search engines search the databases by means of a list of words or a combination of words they have stored/cached over a period of time. The search engines have a computer program called spider that indexes the list of words found in different websites. This program further travels through the links connected with different sites and index another set of words.
Only those sites that are being harvested by the search engine are opened. The spider searches a copy of the site, and when the user clicks on links, the actual site opens. The spiders are programmed to omit articles that appear in a page and detect terms that appear in titles, subtitles and meta tags.
Timeline of Search Engine Evolution
The first search engine, called Archie, was developed by a University student named Alan Emtage. He created the program to search file names from the Internet. In 1993, another program called Aliweb was launched. It was a manually constructed web directory that had several limitations. In the same year, JumpStation was developed by using spider technology. It allowed the users to search keywords in the titles and headers of Web pages.
As the numbers of Web pages increased, the search also became slow and this search engine stopped functioning in 1994. JumpStation, however, can be considered as the first modern search engine. In the same year, WebCrawler was launched. It had better features than JumpStation and searched the entire contents of a Webpage. This search engine was later sold to Excite.
The next one was Lycos that added a few more features to the conventional search engine, such as proximity to matching and listing in the order of relevancy. In 1996, the first meta search engine MetaCrawler was developed. This tool was capable of searching on other search engines and compiling the results. In the following year,
David Filo and JerryYang, two Stanford University students, launched the famous Yahoo. Around this time, Altavista was gaining popularity. It used the spider technology and indexed and responded to millions of pages per day.
Towards the end of 1997, another search engine named Google was launched. The entry of Google marked a major milestone in the history of search engines. Google uses a “page ranking” system on the basis of number of links to a particular site.
At present, Google is a very popular search engine with a huge list of websites in their index. It is so popular that it lead to origin of the term“Googling,” which means to search for information using Google. Bing is a search engine developed by Microsoft, which categorizes searches allowing for improved image and video searches along with preview searches.
Some Popular Search Engines
Following are some of the popular search engines: Baidu (Chinese), Bing (formerly MSN Search and Live Search), Cuil, Duck Duck Go, Sogou (Chinese), Sohu (Chinese), Yandex (Russian), Rediff.com, and Guruji.com.
Future of Search Engines
At present, most of the search engines work on tha basis of the exact matches of the keywords entered for search. This can be confusing as a single word can have different meanings. In future, search engines will be developed on the basis of concept-based searching and natural language queries, and this phase of evolution in search engines has been keenly awaited by users around the world.
Reference:
Eggebrecht, Micheal. "Search Engine Evolution: From Archie to Bing". CIOZone.com. 20/09/09.
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