|
It was bound to happen that Internet purists would find fault with the commercialization
of search engine technology, particularly as it shifted to pay-per-click, for-fee
listings and search engine interfaces became the primary landscape for online
advertising.
Rich Skrenta and Bob Truel used Yahoo!
religiously during the mid-1990s. They preferred its hierarchical structure to
larger search engines such as Excite, Lycos, and AltaVista when it came to finding
things on the Web.
By 1997 Skrenta and Truel were frustrated that Yahoo! was being driven more
by e-commerce and the growth of so-called online communities. As Yahoo! bought
up company after company, expanded to shopping, personal home pages and more,
veteran users like Skrenta and Truel saw the core directories suffering with increasing
number of out-dated and “not found” listings. To them, the bottom
line was that the Web was outpacing Yahoo!
While working at Sun Microsystems, the pair encountered Gnu, the open source version
of UNIX and decided to launch Gnuhoo as an open source directory that would be
free to use, with no charge to submit sites for listing. Gnuhoo was staffed by
volunteer editors who vetted the submissions and found their own links based on
areas of expertise. With 200 editors, 27,000 sites and 2,000 categories, they
quickly caught the attention of major players and just a few five months after
launch, Gnuhoo was bought by Netscape Communications.
Netscape changed the name to the Open Directory Project, and
the ODP quickly became a companion to the Mozilla Project, the open source version
of Netscape’s web browser. ODP unofficially became the “Mozilla Browser”
with the URL of www.dmoz.org.
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
|
- 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
|
SalientMarketing is Search Engine Marketing and Market Research Firm.
Our staff of marketing and technology professionals deliver services that maximize
the return on investment (ROI) for online and offline marketing
initiatives. Our process of implementation is rooted in upfront research followed
by a measurement of success, ensuring that our strategies are on target and
exceed expectations. It's all about taking the guesswork of business success.
>> Click here for our list
of services or solutions that we provide
|
