A search engine is a program that uses specific keywords to find documents containing those keywords.The results are displayed in a list form that is like an index. This index is created by another program called an indexer after the first program uses a spider to collect results. The original concept of storing and retrieving information was first considered in 1945.
In 1957, the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network or ARPANet was created by the Department of Defense. It was developed in part to help the US maintain control over its missiles and bombers after a nuclear attack. It was the precursor to the Internet.
The first search engine is thought to be Archie. It was created in 1990 by Alan Emtage. Archie let users look around the Internet as long as they already knew the name of the file they were looking for. The capability to search for indexed text did not come about until 1991 with another search engine called Gopher. Which was created by Mark McCahill. Since that time many search engines have been developed.
AccuFind was once billed as a metasearch engine that provided quick and easy access to 18 search engines and directories from one page. Metasearch engines gather information from many other Internet search engines. The results are combined into one Internet search tool. Accufind also used the concept of interaction with viewers to provide site rating profiles which enabled the most relevant sites to be displayed first. Unfortunately, the page results would only display in AccuFind and could not be bookmarked. Other more advanced search engines soon prevailed and the AccuFind search engine is no longer in operation, nor is Airs II, Big Dummy Search, or several others.
During the process of Search Engine Evolution a long list of defunct search engines and the date of their demise on the web has developed. Many other sites relating to defunct websites and the Dot com disaster also still linger. Despite these setbacks in the evolution search engines, many have grown and prospered.
Google began its ascent to fame in the year 2000. Today it is one of the largest databases of web pages and its results not only include text documents, but also blog posts, wiki pages, group discussion threads, and document formats such as PDFs, Word, Excel documents, and Powerpoints.
Universal results are the wave of the future and the future is here. Now that search engines are able to crawl files like .pdf and .ppt, there has been an upsurge of activity on the net. Marketers scramble to keep up with bigger and better websites to attract consumers, and individuals can find practically anything within seconds.
There are many directories on the world wide web that list search engines by country, category, or type. Some of the largest are:
A list of the top ten search engines in the United States has been compiled by SEO Consultants.
