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One of the most popular search engines started out as a back rub, or more precisely
“BackRub” between a couple of Stanford University
graduate students named Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
BackRub was a unique search engine designed to analyze the “back links”
that pointed to a given web site. As the project grew, Page and Brin set up a
computing centre in a dorm room and as they broke the terabyte level of data,
renamed BackRub as Google,
a play on googol, a term that described the number 1 followed by 100 zeros.
Page and Brin weren’t interested in building a company around their technology
and tried to sell it off in the early days. Yahoo! founder David Filo told them
to come back when it was commercialized. At the other end of the spectrum, a quick
meeting with Sun Microsystems’ Andy Bechtolsheim on a Stanford University
faculty member’s house porch resulted in a hastily handwritten cheque for
$100,000 to “Google Inc.” and Page and Brin realized they were “stuck”
with their new company.
Google still had a “beta” or test version label on its site until
September 21, 1999, by which time Google Inc. had moved from a dorm room, to a
Menlo Park, California garage, to the 1,000-employee “Googleplex”
headquarters in Mountain View.
As of October, 2003, Google had indexed 3,307,998,701 web pages, millions of
images, countless newsgroups and much more. Its influence is so strong that “to
Google” or Googling” has become synonymous with search the Web, much
the way Xerox has become a synonym for making paper copies.
Here is a growing archive of the search engine history:
- 2003
– Microsoft redux
- 2001 – Goodbye GoTo, hello
Overture
- 2000 – Some Web expertise
- 1999 – A winning
search concept
- 1999 – Now that’s fast!
- 1998 – Its a hit! DirectHit
- 1998 –
And in the other corner... MSN
- 1998 – And
in this corner… Google
- 1998
– The Open (source) Directory Project
- 1997 –
Ask Jeeves, the butler did it
- 1997 – GoTo,
What do I bid?
- 1996 – LookSmart
– the Australian connection
- 1996 – HotBot,
one hot bot!
- 1995/96 –
The Northern Light
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- 1995 – AltaVista
- 1995 –
The Meta-search
- 1994-95 –
InfoSeek
- 1994 – Lycos
- 1994 –
The WebCrawler
- 1994 – Yahoo!
- 1994 – A Galaxy
of web pages
- 1993 – The
birth of Excite
- 1993
- The Web’s oldest existing search engine
- 1993 – The
first web robot
- 1993 - Archie’s
pal, Jughead
- 1993
- Veronica, the grandmother of search engines
- 1989
- Archie, the grandfather of all search engines
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