Web Search Engines

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During the Internet's nascent years, there was little need for search engine.  The network was a resource only known to and used by academia and the military.  If you used it, you already new exactly where you where going.  The concept of "surfing" would have been unthinkable .

The first quasi-search engine was 1991's Archie ("archive" without the "vee"), a searchable database of all public anonymous FTP site directory listings.

The rise of Gopher, with it's search compatible protocols, facilitated Veronica and Jughead, the first programs that we might recognize today as Search Engines.  However, it was not until the now-defunct, Wandex (1993) that the World Wide Web finally had it's first modern search engine.  Like the subsequent Aliweb, JumpStation the programs used "webcrawlers" to seek out web pages.  The technology advance exponentially, and the next year WebCrawler became the first full-text search engine.  This would become the defacto standard until today.  Webcrawler's easy of use and power made it the first search engine recognizable by the general public.

The  field quickly became crowded over the next couple of years with many names still recognizable today: Lycos, InfoSeek, AltaVista, Excite, Dogpile and AskJeeves.

In 1998, a little noticed company entered the field: Google.  Named after a mis-spelling of the numeric concept of "Googol" the company has come to be synonymous with no just search engines, but with ANY research.

But before Google would become the industries Atlas, Yahoo! became the industries first "rock star."  In a "You've Know You've Made It" move, the company's ad was shown during the 2000 Superbowl.  Before Google overwhelmed all comers, "Yahoo" became the first verb of search engines.  Search engines had entered the common man's lexicon.

Since then, Microsoft has made several attempt to play catch-up.  Late to the game and fully appreciating the importance of the Internet, the computing behemoth has gone through several version of it's Search Engine looking for a suitable champion;  Live is the most recent effort that uses it's proprietary "msbot" webcrawlers.  But what Microsoft can't acquire through in-house competencies, it's more than willing to force with it's vast treasury.  In the last few months, it has been pursuing a $44B purchase of Yahoo! as the latest front to compete with Google.  From an Internet nicety to battleground for two of the world largest companies, Web Search Engines have become arguably the most important commercial enterprises of the entire Information Technology industry and one of the most challenged markets in the world

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