8 Search Engines 1. WebCrawler WebCrawler started life in January 1994. Designed by Brian Pinkerton at the University of Washington, it was originally a desktop app. Of all still-surviving search engines, WebCrawler is the oldest search engine that is still active. Today, it aggregates results from Google and Yahoo; it abandoned its own database in 2001. 2. Lycos Lycos is another old-school search engine that still has a functioning site. Like WebCrawler, Lycos is still going strong. It owns several other nostalgic internet brands, including Angelfire, Tripod, and Gamesville. 3. AltaVista AltaVista went live in December 1995 and quickly became one of the most popular search engines in the 1990s. Its popularity was down to the search engine's design; it was the first fully searchable, full-text database on the web that had an accessible and easy-to-use interface. In 2003, Overture bought the site for $140 million, with Yahoo subsequently acquiring Overture later in the same year. The site finally went offline in 2013. 4. Excite Excite was one of the first search engines that provided more than just search. When the site went live in 1995, it also offered portals for news and weather, an email service, an instant messaging service, stock quotes, and a fully customizable homepage. 5. Yahoo Yahoo was founded in 1994 with its site going live in 1995. It is the most well-known of all the pre-Google search engines. 6. Dogpile Today, Dogpile aggregates results from Google, Yahoo, and the Russian search engine, Yandex (which is also older than Google!). 7. Ask Jeeves The vision was to create a search engine that allowed users to get answers using natural language as well as keyword searching. While many of us now take that for granted thanks to Google, at the time, it was revolutionary. 8. JumpStation Often considered to be the first "modern search engine," The site used document titles and headings to index web pages and did not provide any form of ranking, meaning it could be an arduous task to find the exact result that you were looking for. These Old Search Engines Will Always Be Remembered The internet was much different before Google became the king of the world wide web. Although these old search engines tried to make it big, they were eventually forgotten or stamped out by Google's massive growth. The History of Google You know that Google is a search engine and that Chrome is the browser. Well, how did it start?. Google started in 1996 when Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Backrub at Harvard. Yes, Backrub! This was the name of ‘Google’ before they changed it. Imagine what it would be like if you had to say “backrub it” instead of “google it”. Fortunately for us, Larry wanted to change the name. They discussed it and settled, “Googol”. But, they accidentally searched for the domain, “Google.com” and Larry liked it better. So, they changed “backrub” into “google”. Their first HQ was a garage owned by a fellow friend in Menlo park, California. Later, they raised a few money and made their original shop. In 2008, they released Google Chrome, a web browser, on Windows XP. It was totally awesome! This was actually the address bar and search bar merged together. Other Popular Features of Chrome Later, Google released many new features such as search options, Google News, Google books, Google Suggest etc. The +1 button for rating search results was also popular. In 2001 they released Google Image Search feature and later in 2006 they acquired YouTube as a subsidiary of their company. Then, those people added YT as their main source for videos. Good for them, eh? But they’re still not done. They added more cool stuff like incognito mode, browser history, voice search , many more Google apps like Google Drive, Google Meet or Google Hangouts. The webstore, the extensions and finally, Chrome for Android, iOS and macs were released. A new look for Google Chrome They finally introduced a new look for Chrome, which was a lot more less-crappy than the last one. And, also an awesome new logo that was made by their Material Design. Conclusion So this is how Google came to be and became the most popular search engine in the world and made the internet aka www. less boring for us. Conclusion Google today has offices in 50 countries and employs around 60,000 people. Its many products are used by billions across the globe and have become an integral part of our lives. It is one of the biggest success stories of our times and does not show any signs of slowing down or foregoing its top spot. From being at least five times faster than other contemporary search engines and having a much deeper site index to prioritising the relevancy/context of search results and snippets that are query-specific, Google has reinvented itself from time to time. While its future looks brighter than ever, users and webmasters around the world wait with bated breath to see what they come up with next. Google, in full Google LLC formerly Google Inc. (1998–2017), American search engine company, founded in 1998 by Sergey Brin and Larry Page, that is a subsidiary of the holding company Alphabet Inc. More than 70 percent of worldwide online search requests are handled by Google, placing it at the heart of most Internet users’ experience. Its headquarters are in Mountain View, California. Google began as an online search firm, but it now offers more than 50 Internet services and products, from e-mail and online document creation to software for mobile phones and tablet computers. In addition, its 2012 acquisition of Motorola Mobility put it in the position to sell hardware in the form of mobile phones. Google’s broad product portfolio and size make it one of the top four influential companies in the high-tech marketplace, along with Apple, IBM, and Microsoft. Despite this myriad of products, its original search tool remains the core of its success. In 2016 Alphabet earned nearly all of its revenue from Google advertising based on users’ search requests. The true story behind Google's hilarious first name: BackRub According to Stanford’s David Koller, and Google’s own website, Page and Brin’s 1996 foray into the world of search engines was initially called “BackRub.” Yes, BackRub. They called it this because the program analyzed the web’s “back links” to understand how important a website was, and what other sites it related to. BackRub operated on Stanford’s servers until it eventually took up too much bandwidth. The name “Google” actually came from a graduate student at Stanford named Sean Anderson, Koller writes. Anderson suggested the word “googolplex” during a brainstorming session, and Page countered with the shorter “googol.” Googol is the digit 1 followed by 100 zeroes, while googolplex is 1 followed by a googol zeros. Anderson checked to see if that domain name was taken, but accidentally searched for “google.com” instead of “googol.com.” Page liked that name even better, and registered the domain name for Brin and himself on September 15, 1997. Backrub BackRub was an early search engine from the 1990s which is now regarded as the predecessor of the Google search engine. It was personally developed and operated by Google founder Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Can you imagine a world without search engines? Before the invention of Archie, a simple yet effective webbased search engine, by Alan Emtage in 1990, finding anything online was less than pleasant. This was a turning point for internet users as it was closely followed by the launch of many other bigger and better search engines, including Excite, Yahoo, Infoseek, AltaVista, Ask Jeeves, and of course the now ever-popular Google. Although search engines populate highly personalized, contextual search results in a fraction of a second, there is more than what meets the eye. This, more so in the case of Google, the world leader in online search, with its mammoth 88.47% market share, not to mention its numerous other products and services. If you have forever wondered about the history of Google, including how it took over the world of internet search, this post is for you. We take you through a timeline of Google’s most landmark moments, right from its humble beginnings to its ambitious plans for the future. A search engine, simply put, is a software program that helps you find appropriate content online (video, textual, images, etc.). It sorts/indexes the sites of the world wide web according to various parameters like search keyword density in your site content, backlinks, etc. When you query in a keyword or phrase, it goes through its database of crawled sites and populates the addresses of those it finds most relevant. The order in which such sites are ranked is based on an internal search algorithm that decides how useful they are to you, with the top most search results on the first SERP (search engine results page) being the most relevant. The SERP may also carry paid ads as per the PPC model (pay-per-click) at the top of the afore-mentioned organic search results. The history of Google is incomplete without mentioning its rather simple beginnings. Two Stanford University PhD students, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, met in 1995 and began working on a dissertation project that detailed the mathematical properties of the internet. In other words, the dynamic duo was interested in proving that the higher the number of quality backlinks pointing to a site, the more relevant it is to a specific search topic/keyword. This was in contrast to previous search engines that prioritized content keyword density above all else. Nicknaming their fledgling project ‘BackRub’, Page and Brin tested their web crawler in March 1996, starting out by crawling Page’s Stanford web page. All the data collected was then analyzed and sorted by their brilliant ranking algorithm called PageRank, which ranked websites based on the number of times they were linked to by other high-authority or popular sites. Motivated by the positive reviews BackRub got, Page and Brin launched the very first version of Google in August 1996 while working from their dorm rooms, using borrowed personal computers and buying terabytes of memory space with their own credit cards. The name ‘Google’ was a derivative of the word ‘googol’, meaning a 1 followed by a hundred zeros, alluding to the huge volumes of information they had to sift through to populate the correct search results. This word had been referenced in the book Mathematics and the Imagination by James Newman and Edward Kasner, something the duo had read and loved. Today, Google and other search engines are smarter than ever—they use machine learning to help process and rank information, and can understand natural human speech. But the internet wasn’t always so easy to navigate! There was a time when you had to know the exact wording of a website’s title to find it. Search results were riddled with spam. Getting new content indexed by the search engines could take weeks to complete. How Google Search works Every time you search, there are thousands, sometimes millions, of webpages with helpful information. How Google figures out which results to show starts long before you even type, and is guided by a commitment to you to provide the best information. HOW GOOGLE IMPACTED THE WORLD 1. Immediate information – whether using our PC, laptop, mobile phone or tablet, we can now switch on and search for anything we need and get myriad results within seconds. 2. It’s changed our thinking – where we used to have to think and troubleshoot for ourselves, we now rely on Google to do our thinking for us. If we’re not sure of the answer to something, we simply look online. 3. It’s changed communications – apart perhaps from Christmas cards and the like, when was the last time you sat and wrote a handwritten letter? Google’s proprietary email client, Gmail, has over a billion active monthly users who connect with clients, colleagues and friends through this facility, often as an alternative to face-to-face or even verbal communications. 4. Capacity for communications – Gmail also made sorting and deleting emails a thing of the past, with its incredible capacity for handling and storing these communications. 5. Working methodology – Google docs has allowed us to collaborate online, in real time. We can upload, amend and edit work and instantly share the changes with our colleagues, making us more efficient and reducing admin. 6. Finding our way – as well as allowing us to navigate through all the online information, Google also brought us incredible mapping and travel facilities through Google Maps – plus we can check out our destinations with real-world visuals so we know what we’re looking for when we arrive! We can also find local facilities or services we may want to use by using Google My Business! 7. News and views – Google has changed the way we access and assimilate news, pushing print production down and giving us the opportunity to comment on the real issues of the world as soon as a story breaks. 8. Search sophistication – we now think of information in keywords and contextual search terms, knowing that Google’s sophisticated algorithms will serve up relevant info at the click of a button. 9.. Mixing up your marketing – whether it’s pay per click advertising campaigns, optimising our web content to help Google (and its users) find us, or inserting videos into our online marketing avenues, we now primarily promote ourselves online and rely on Google to reap results for us. Google, the revolutionary search engine that serves as a primary search engine for the public, impacted the methodology of thinking through both positive and negative consequences. The beneficial factors of Google are unlocking thresholds of numerous fields of information. Lets take education for example. The explosion of this form of media has allowed individuals to access different types of hyperlinks. Google has allowed students to incorporate information for research projects, allowed individuals to keep track of the stock market, and provided unique opportunities for people. Everything has simply been digitalized into pieces of information that attracted the hearts and minds of individuals. The digital transformation convinced individuals to understand and be aware of things previous generations did not have access to. References: https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/7-search-engines-that-rocked-before-google-even-existed/ https://techknowtoday.com/the-history-of-google-and-chrome/ https://www.businessinsider.com/the-true-story-behind-googles-first-name-backrub-2015-10 https://www.infidigit.com/blog/history-of-google/ https://www.computerhope.com/jargon/g/google.htm https://www.notablebiographies.com/news/Ow-Sh/Page-Larry-and-BrinSergey.html#ixzz6vkmNgbhy https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/ https://weareama.com/googles-impact-world/#:~:text=1.,do%20our%20thinking%20for%20us.
