| SEO Resources Menu | |
 |
|
Today’s high-performance Internet search engines have been developed and refined in a remarkably short period of time.
Academics and scientists had rudimentary tools similar to search engines as early as the 1970s. However the amount of information they accessed is a mere drop in the bucket compared to what the average computer user can access today.
Just one search engine Google (www.google.com) has indexed more than 3.3 billion web pages as of October, 2003 an increase of 1.2 billion pages in 20 months – or 23 pages a second!
1994 was clearly a blockbuster year in the history of the search engine and the theme of the spider and the Web couldn’t be any clearer with the birth of Lycos at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University in July 1994.
Dr. Michael Mauldin, at CMU’s Center for Machine Translation, developed Lycos, named for the wolf spider Lycosidae lycosa around the core of another program called LongLegs written by John Leavitt. Mauldin wrote the Pursuit retrieval engine which was designed to retrieve and process text from very large databases.
When Lycos went public with a catalogue of 54,000 documents on the Web, it added yet more value to web searching – a ranking of relevance, prefix matching and word proximity bonuses. In other words, users were now able to determine the accuracy of their search efforts to home in on the desired information. By August 1994 the Lycos catalogue had reached 394,000 documents; by January 1995 1.5 million documents, and by November 1996, more than 60 million documents – more than any other search engine.
By 1994 the Internet was the primary source of discussion at most computer science programs. Things were no different at the University of Washington where student Brian Pinkerton developed a small single-user application to find information on the Web. At the encouragement of fellow students, Pinkerton built a web interface to his WebCrawler program, which was released on April 20, 1994, with a database containing documents from over 6,000 web servers.
The WebCrawler was unique in that it was the first web robot to capable of indexing every word on a web page, while other bots were storing a URL, a title and at most 100 words. In a few short months, the WebCrawler was averaging 15,000 hits a day. Demand eventually crashed the University of Washington’s network. America Online (AOL) eventually bought WebCrawler and ran it on its system. Excite bought WebCrawler in 1997.
As the spread of the Internet and the Web took off exponentially, its use as a social magnet grew with it. People – mostly students – began to create pages of links to other web pages that interested them, so that friends and colleagues could share them easily.
David Filo and Jerry Yang were two Ph.D. candidates at Stanford University who started their guide to web sites in a campus trailer in February 1994 to keep track of their personal interests. It wasn’t long before they spent more time on the list of web site links than on their doctoral dissertations. As the lists grew, they broke them into categories, then subcategories. At this point, the web site that started out as Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web was renamed Yahoo! with the help of a dictionary. While some say Yahoo! stands for Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle, Filo and Yang insist it was simply named after them – a couple of “yahoos” as the dictionary stated: “Rude, unsophisticated, uncouth.”
Word of Yahoo! spread quickly and in the fall of 1994, the site had its first million-hit day, representing almost 100,000 unique visitors.
Launched in January 1994, Galaxy.com was the first searchable Internet directory. Galaxy was created as part of the Einet division at the MCC Research Consortium at the University of Texas. The original initiative was to develop tools for large-scale directory services to support electronic commerce.
The ownership of Galaxy has changed hands numerous times through a series of mergers and acquisitions. Today Galaxy.com is owned by Logika Corporation, of Chicago and has a directory of more than 3.2 million listings, across more than 680,000 categories.
The popular public search engine Excite began life as a project called Architext created by six Stanford undergraduates in February 1993. Their idea was to use statistical analysis of word relationships in order to provide more efficient searches through the large amount of information on the Internet. Their project was fully funded by mid-1993. Once funding was secured, they released a version of their search software for webmasters to use on their own web sites. The software today is called Excite for Web Servers.
