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.

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.

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.

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 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.