The World wide web was born in November 1990, with the launch of first webserver (web page ) hosted at the CERN research facility in Switzerland .
By the early 1993, the stage was set for the web explosion. In February of that year the first alpha release of the NCSA Mosaic Graphical browser provided a client application that, but the end of the year, was available on all major desktop computing plateforms.
The Netscape browser, based on Mosaic was released in 194. By this time dial-up internet access had become readily available and was cheap. The web was taking off !
Even though the combination of cheap dial up internet connection and the mosaic browser had made the web semi popular, there was no way to search the growing collection of hypertext document available online.
The first automated webcrawler or robo, was the World wide web wanderer created by MIT student Mathew Gray.
Martin Koster created the first web directory. ALIWeb in late 1993, but it, like the wanderer, met with limited success.
1994 was a big year in the history of web search. The first hierarchical directory Galaxy, was launched in January and, in April Satndford students David Filo and Jerry Yang created ‘Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle'., better known as YAHOO.
During the same month, Brian Pinkerton at the University of Washington released WebCrawler. This is the first true web search engine, indexed the entire content of the web pages, where previous crawlers had indexed little more than page titles, headings and URLs. Lycos was launched a few months later.
By the end of 1995, nearly a dozen major search engines were online. Names like Meta Crawler, Magellan, Info seek and Excite were release into cyberspace, throughout the year. AltaVista arrived on the scene in December with a stunningingly large database and many advanced features and Inktomi debuted the following year.
Most successful ideas from that time:
- GoTo (now Overture) introduced the concept of pay-per-click (PPC) listing in 19197.
- The Mining Company (now About) launched in February 1997, using human experts to create a more exclusive directory.
- Direct Hit introduced the concept of user feedback in 1998, allocating a higher ranking to sites whose listing were clicked by users.
- Pay-to-play was introduced, as search engines and directories sought to capatilize on the value of their editorial listings. The looksmart and Yahoo directories began to charge fees for the review and inclusion of business Websites. Inktomi launched “paid inclusion” and “trusted feed”, allowing site owners to ensure their inclusion in the Inktomi search engine.
By the time thesearch engine was officially launched as Google in September 1998, it had already become a very popular player.
One of the most appealing aspects of Google was its ultra-simple user interdace. Advertising was conspicuously absent from Google's home page- a great advantage in a market whose keyplayers typically adorned their page with multiple banners – and the portal took only a few seconds to load even on a slow odial-up connection.
By the time Google began to show a few paid listing through the Adwords service in late 2000, users didn't mind: Google had successfully established itself as the leading search portal and, unlike many other search engines, it didn't attempt to hide paid advertising among regular web search results.
AOL and YAHOO made arrangements to display Google's results on their own pages, as did many minor searchportals. By the end of 2003, it was estimated that three quarters of all web searches returned Google-powered results.
Google Achieved the monopoly in 2003.
The Year 2001-2003 saw a series of acquisitions that rapidly consolidated the search industry into a handful of major players. Yahoo acquired the Inktomi search engine in March2003; Overture acquired Altavista and All the web a month later ; Yahoo! Announced the acquisition of Overture in 2003.
Lets take a journey of 2004
Yahoo released its own search engine powered by a fusion of the Altavista, Inktomi, and all the web technology they acquired in 2003. Yahoo stop returning google results in 2004.
Google's Adwords and Adsense systems, which deliver pay-per-click listings to search portals and websites respectively, grew dramatically. Google filed for an initial public offering.
The popularity of the Ask search portal, powered by the innovative Teoma search engine, steadily increased. Like most portals that Yahoo! doesn't own, Ask uses Google's Adwords for paid listings.
The 800-lb gorilla of the computing world, Microsoft announced plans for its own search engine releasing beta versions for public use in January and June of 2004, and formally .launches the services in February 2005. Microsoft now offers MSN search results on the MSN portal.
