Search Engine History

In 1990, Alan Emtage created the first search tool used on the internet. His creation, an index of files on the internet was called Archie.

In 1991, however, another student named Mark McCahill, at the University of Minnesota, created Gopher, a program that index the plain text documents that later became the first web sites on the public internet.

The first real search engine, in the form that we know search engines today, didn’t come into begin until 1993. It was developed by Mathew Gray, and it was called Wandex. Wandex was the first program to both index and search the index of pages on the web. This technology was the first program to crawl the web, and later became the basis for all search crawlers. The major search that are created between 1993 to 1998 are:

Excite-1993
Yahoo-1994
WebCrawler-1994
Lycos-1994
Infoseek-1995
Alta Vista-1995
Inktomi-1996
Ask Jeeves-1997
Google-1997
MSN Search-1998

It’s hard to believe that the concept of a search engine is just over 15 years old.