The Development of Search Engines

The Internet is a network of networks, along with the Web it is a product of a number of factors. The Internet can be defined as a database that holds information about everything and everything. A collection of items are stored within this database and we able to search for it and retrieve it whenever we want.

This moves me on to talk about search engines. When we use the Internet we tend to look for information, we either type what we are looking for into Google or even Yahoo for example. These are known as search engines. It searches documents for specified keywords and returns a list of the documents containing this keywords. Search engines enable us to be exposed to other sites that are possibly cheaper and offer a better service.

The very first search engine on the Internet was Archie, which dates back to 1991. The name derives from the word "archive". Next up was the search engine Veronica in 1992 and along came Webcrawler and Yahoo in 1994. This website shows us the evolution of search engines and how they have developed.

Then along came the most widely-used directory on the Web, Google. Launched in 1997, it sends out a spider to find as many documents as possible, then a program called an indexer reads these documents and creates an index based on the words contained in each document.

Search engines have developed and improved over time. Early search engines held an index of a few hundred thousand pages and documents, and received only one or two thousand inquiries each day. Whereas, today, a top search engine will index hundreds of millions of pages, and respond to roughly tens of millions of queries per day.