Spaces, 156 Great Charles Street Queensway, B3 3HN

0121 272 8378

Past Search Engines – The Evolution

Timeline of search engine logos

Past Search Engines – The Evolution

We all know what a Search Engine is – and how we use them in everyday life. But can you remember the time before Google? 

Here’s a timeline of the evolution of the Search Engine…

1989 – Archie was the very first search engine, that searched FTP sites to create an index for downloadable files, but not the contents for each site.

1993 – Aliweb was created. This crawled meta info and allowed users to submit web pages that they wanted to, although people didn’t know how to submit their sites!

1994 – Lycos website went public with 54,000 documents and ranked by relevance

1994 – Yahoo was created, which began as a collection of web pages that included man-made descriptions with each URL, and as they increased in size they became a searchable directory.

1995 – Excite was created, and the idea of this search engine was to use statistical analysis to provide efficient searches.

1995 – Altavista was the first search engine with unlimited bandwidth, natural language enquiries and advanced searching techniques.

1996 – Ask Jeeves is created – human editors tried to match search queries and rank by popularity. Unfortunately, this meant it was easy to spam

1996 – BackRub is created, which is a search engine utilised backlinks for search, and ranked pages based on how many links it had from other sites.

1997 – Google is born! Its algorithm is able to yield relevant search results at a very quick rate.

1998 – MSN is created, but relies on other networks until Google provides their backlinks.

2006 – Google acquires Youtube, which is now the second largest search engine.

2007 – Google created “Universal Search.” 

2009 – MSN becomes ‘Bing’

2010 – Google Instant shows real-time search results for users as they enter a query.

2011 – Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft (Bing) create Schema.org. Which intentions of a more structured internet.

2014 – Yahoo! becomes the default search engine for Mozilla Firefox in the US.

2015 – Google unleashes Mobilegeddon to force websites to add mobile-friendly websites. The change acknowledges the rapid rise in mobile search use.

2017 – Google updates punish sites that use pop ups that are not mobile friendly

 

And there we have it, a timeline of all the Past Search Engines! With the internet ever changing, search engines will have to update and change in order to keep up with peoples changing needs.

 

Related Services

 

PPC

Since then we’ve diversified our Paid Search offering but remain one of the best in the game at PPC.

Rebecca is a Digital Marketing Coordinator at Siren Search.

No Comments

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.