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This page provides a fulltimeline of web search engines, starting from theWHOis in 1982, theArchie search engine in 1990, and subsequent developments in the field. It is complementary to thehistory of web search engines page that provides more qualitative detail on the history.
| Year | Month | Day | Event type | Event | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1982 | Pre-web domain search engine | WHOis[1][2]Elizabeth Feinler and her team (who had created the Resource Directory forARPANET) were responsible for creating the first WHOIS directory in the early 1970s.[3] Feinler set up a server inStanford's Network Information Center (NIC) which acted as a directory that could retrieve relevant information about people or entities.[4] She and the team createddomains, with Feinler's suggestion that domains be divided into categories based on the physical address of the computer.[5] | |||
| 1990 | September[6] | 10 (released)[6] | Pre-web content search engine | TheArchie search engine, created byAlan Emtage[7][8][9][10] computer science student atMcGill University inMontreal, goes live. The program downloads the directory listings of all the files located on public anonymous FTP (File Transfer Protocol) sites, creates a searchable database of a lot of file names; however, Archie does not index the contents of these sites since the amount of data is so limited it can be readily searched manually.[11][12][13][14] | |
| 1991 | Pre-web search engine | The rise ofGopher (created in 1991 byMark McCahill at theUniversity of Minnesota) leads to two new search programs,Veronica andJughead. Like Archie, they search the file names and titles stored in Gopher index systems. Veronica (VeryEasyRodent-OrientedNet-wideIndex toComputerizedArchives) provides a keyword search of most Gopher menu titles in the entire Gopher listings. Jughead (Jonzy'sUniversalGopherHierarchyExcavationAndDisplay) is a tool for obtaining menu information from specific Gopher servers. While the name of the search engine "Archie" was not a reference to theArchie comic book series, "Veronica" and "Jughead" are characters in the series, thus referencing their predecessor.[13] | |||
| 1992 | Virtual library of the web | Tim Berners-Lee sets up theVirtual Library (VLib), a loose confederation of topical experts maintaining relevant topical link lists.[13][14] | |||
| 1993 | June | Firstweb robot | Matthew K. Gray produces the first knownweb robot, thePerl-basedWorld Wide Web Wanderer, and uses it to generate an index of the web called the Wandex.[13][14][15] However, the World Wide Web Wanderer is intended only to measure the size of the web rather than to facilitate search. | ||
| September | 2 | First web search engine | W3Catalog, written byOscar Nierstrasz at theUniversity of Geneva, is released to the world. It is the world's first web search engine. It does not rely on a crawler and indexer but rather on already existing high-quality lists of websites. One of its main drawbacks is that the bot accesses each page hundreds of times each day, causing performance degradation.[13][14][16][17] | ||
| October/November | Second web search engine | Aliweb, a web search engine created byMartijn Koster, is announced. It does not use a web robot, but instead depends on being notified by website administrators of the existence at each site of an index file in a particular format. The absence of a bot means that less bandwidth is used; however, most website administrators are not aware of the need to submit their data.[13][14] | |||
| December | First web search engine to use acrawler and indexer | JumpStation, created byJonathon Fletcher, is released. It is the first WWW resource-discovery tool to combine the three essential features of a web search engine (crawling, indexing, and searching).[13][14][18] | |||
| 1994 | January | New web directory | Yahoo!, founded byJerry Yang andDavid Filo, launchesYahoo! Directory.[14] It becomes the first popularWeb directory.[19] | ||
| New web search engine | Infoseek is launched.[13][14] | ||||
| March | New web search engine | TheWorld-Wide Web Worm is released. It is claimed to have been created in September 1993, at which time there did not exist any crawler-based search engine, but it is not the earliest at the time of its actual release. It supportsPerl-based regular expressions.[13][14] | |||
| April | 20 | New web search engine | TheWebCrawler search engine, created by Brian Pinkerton at theUniversity of Washington, is released.[14] Unlike its predecessors, it allows users to search for any word in any webpage, which has become the standard for all major search engines since. | ||
| July | New web search engine | Lycos, a web search engine, is released.[14] It began as a research project byMichael Loren Mauldin ofCarnegie Mellon University's mainPittsburgh campus. | |||
| 1995 | New search engine | Yahoo! Search is launched. It is a search function that allows users to search Yahoo! Directory.[20][21] It becomes the first popular search engine on the Web.[19] However, it is not a trueWeb crawler search engine. | |||
| New search engine | Search.ch is launched. It is asearch engine andweb portal forSwitzerland.[22] | ||||
| New web directory | LookSmart is released. It competes withYahoo! as a web directory, and the competition makes both directories more inclusive.[citation needed] | ||||
| December | Web search engine supporting natural language queries | Altavista is launched. This is a first among web search engines in many ways: it has unlimited bandwidth, allows natural language queries, has search tips, and allows people to add or delete their domains in 24 hours.[13][14] | |||
| 1996 | New web search engine | Robin Li developed theRankDex site-scoring algorithm for search engines results page ranking[23][24][25] and received a US patent for the technology.[26] It was the first search engine that used hyperlinks to measure the quality of websites it was indexing,[27] predating the very similar algorithm patent filed byGoogle two years later in 1998.[28]Larry Page referenced Li's work as a citation in some of his U.S. patents forPageRank.[29] Li later used his Rankdex technology for theBaidu search engine. | |||
| January–March | New web search engine | Larry Page andSergey Brin begin working onBackRub, the predecessor toGoogle Search. The crawler begins activity in March.[14] | |||
| May | New web search engine | Inktomi releases itsHotBot search engine.[14] | |||
| October | New web search engine | Gary Culliss and Steven Yang begin work at MIT on the popularity engine, a version of theDirect Hit Technologies search engine that ranks results across users according to the selections made during previous searches. | |||
| 1997 | April | New natural language-based web search engine | Ask Jeeves, a natural language web search engine, that aims to rank links by popularity, is released. It would later becomeAsk.com.[14][30] | ||
| September | 15 | New web search engine | The domain Google.com is registered.[30] Soon, Google Search is available to the public from this domain (around 1998). | ||
| 23 | New web search engine (non-English) | Arkady Volozh andIlya Segalovich launch theirRussian web search engineYandex and publicly present it at the Softool exhibition in Moscow. The initial development is by Comptek; Yandex would become a separate company in 2000.[31] | |||
| 1998 | June | 5 | New web directory | Gnuhoo, a web directory project byRich Skrenta andBob Truel, both employees ofSun Microsystems, launches.[14][32] It would later be renamed theOpen Directory Project. | |
| July–September | New web search portal | MSN launches a search portal called MSN Search, using search results fromInktomi. After many changes to the backend search engine, MSN would start developing in-house search technology in 2005, and later change its name toBing in June 2009.[33] | |||
| August | New web search engine | Direct Hit Technologies releases their popularity search engine in partnership with HotBot, providing more relevant results based on prior user search activity.[34] | |||
| 1999 | May | New web search engine | AlltheWeb, based on the Ph.D. thesis of Tor Egge at theNorwegian University of Science and Technology, titledFTP Search, launches. The engine is launched by Egge's companyFast Search & Transfer, established on July 16, 1997.[14] | ||
| 2000 | January | 1 | New web search portal | Baidu, a Chinese company that would grow to provide many search-related services, launches. It was founded byRobin Li, who previously developedRankDex in 1996.[citation needed] | |
| 2002–03 | Web search business consolidation | Yahoo! buys Inktomi (2002) and thenOverture Services Inc. (2003) which has already boughtAlltheWeb andAltavista. Starting 2003, Yahoo! starts using its ownYahoo Slurp web crawler to powerYahoo! Search. Yahoo! Search combines the technologies of all Yahoo!'s acquisitions (until 2002, Yahoo! had been using Google to power its search).[citation needed] | |||
| 2004–05 | November (2004) – February (2005) | Change in backend providers | Microsoft starts using its own indexer and crawler for MSN Search rather than using blended results fromLookSmart andInktomi.[citation needed] | ||
| 2004 | December | User experience | Google Suggest is introduced as aGoogle Labs feature.[35][36] | ||
| 2005 | January | Webmaster tools | To combat link spam,Google,Yahoo! andMicrosoft collectively introduce thenofollow attribute.[37] | ||
| October | New web search engine | Overture Services Inc. ownerBill Gross launches the Snap search engine, with many features such as display of search volumes and other information, as well as sophisticated auto-completion and related terms display. It is unable to get traction and soon goes out of business.[14][38] | |||
| 2006 | December | 23 (proposed) | New human-curated web search engine | Wikia Search (Wikia), a search engine based on human curation.[39] | |
| 2007 | January | 31 (re-proposed) | Wikia Search[40] | ||
| 2008 | January | 28 | New web search engine | Cuil, a web search engine created by ex-Googlers that uses picture thumbnails to display search results, launches.[41] It would later shut down on September 17, 2010.[42][43][44] | |
| September | 25 | New web search engine | DuckDuckGo (DDG), a web search engine focused on protecting searchers'privacy by not profiling its users, launches.[45][46] | ||
| 2009 | March–May | 14 | Web search EOL | shutdown ofWikia Search[47] | |
| July | 29 | Web search engine consolidation | Microsoft andYahoo! announce that they have made a ten-year deal in which theYahoo! search engine would be replaced by Bing. Yahoo! will get to keep 88% of the revenue from all search ad sales on its site for the first five years of the deal, and have the right to sell adverts on some Microsoft sites. Yahoo! Search will still maintain its ownuser interface, but will eventually feature "Powered by Bing™" branding.[48][49] | ||
| August | 10 (announced) | Search algorithm update | NamedCaffeine, it promises faster crawling, expansion of the index, and a near-real-time integration of indexing and ranking.[37][50][51][52][53] | ||
| September | 1 | New web search engine | The search engineImHalal is launched built on top of social-cultural Islamic values.[54] | ||
| December | 7 | New web search engine | The search engineEcosia is launched.[55] | ||
| 2010 | June | 8 | Search algorithm update | Caffeine rollout completed and made live[56][57][58] | |
| September | 8 | User experience | Google launchesGoogle Instant, described as asearch-before-you-type feature: as users are typing, Google predicts the user's whole search query (using the same technology as inGoogle Suggest, later called the autocomplete feature)and instantaneously shows results for the top prediction.[59][60][61] Google claims that this is estimated to save 2–5 seconds per search query.[62] SEO commentators initially believe that this will have a major effect onsearch engine optimization, but soon revise downward their estimate of the impact.[37][63] | ||
| November | 1 | New web search engine | Blekko, a search engine that uses slashtags to allow people to search in more targeted categories, launches.[64] | ||
| 2011 | February | 23–24 | Search algorithm update | Google launchesGoogle Panda, a major update affecting 12% of search queries. The update continues with the earlier work of cracking down on spam, content farms,scrapers, and websites with a high ad-to-content ratio.[37][65][66][67] The rollout is gradual over several months, and Panda will see many further updates. | |
| June | 2 | Webmaster tools | Google,Yahoo!, andMicrosoft announceSchema.org, a joint initiative that supports a richer range of tags that websites can use to convey better information.[37][68][69][70] | ||
| 2012 | January | 10 | Search algorithm update, user experience | Google launchesSearch Plus Your World, a deep integration of one's social data into search.[71][72] SEO commentators are critical of how the search results favorGoogle+ and push it to users, compared to more widely used social networks such asFacebook andTwitter.[73][74][75][76] | |
| April | 24 | Search algorithm update | Google launches its "Webspam update" which would soon become known asGoogle Penguin.[37][77][78][79][80] | ||
| May | 10 | User experience | Microsoft announces a redesign of itsBing search engine that includes "Sidebar", a social feature that searches users' social networks for information relevant to the search query.[81] | ||
| 16 | Search algorithm update | Google starts rolling outKnowledge Graph, used by Google internally to store semantic relationships between objects. Google now begins displaying supplemental information about objects related to search queries on the side.[37][82][83][84] | |||
| 2013 | April | 13 | New web search engine | Pipilika, first Bangla search engine, launched.[85] | |
| July | 4 | New web search engine | French search engineQwant launched and operated from Paris. It claims that it does not employ user tracking or personalize search results in order to avoid trapping users in a filter bubble. The search engine is available in 26 languages.[citation needed] | ||
| September | 26 | Search algorithm update | Google releasesGoogle Hummingbird, a core algorithm update that may enable a more semantic search and more effective use of theKnowledge Graph in the future.[37][86][87] | ||
| 2014 | January | 22 | New web search engine | Searx, a free and open-sourcemetasearch engine, is launched.[88] Searx puts anemphasis on privacy.[89] | |
| July | 24 | Search algorithm update | Google introducesGoogle Pigeon, with the goal of increasing the ranking of local listings in a search.[90][91] | ||
| 2021 | June | 21 | New web search engine | Brave Software, Inc., the developer of theBrave web browser, launches their own search engine, calledBrave Search.[92][93] | |
| 2024 | July | 26 | New web search engine | OpenAI launchesSearchGPT, a prototype search engine that combines traditional search engine features with generative AI capabilities. SearchGPT's architecture is built on the principles oftransformer models, which use self- attention mechanisms to process and generate text.[94] |