Thanks to the evolution of search engines and technology, a whole new electronic market share has been brought into the economy that offer consumers low cost products, variety, and unique services never offered before. Search engines crawl the World Wide Web in search of content, popularity, and user analytics to bring you web pages that relate to your search term. Without any form of search mechanism on the internet; the web would not be what it is today.
Some of the most visited search engines.
Google
The “Google” search engine was started in January 1996, as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Their theory was that a search engine that could interpret themes between a variety of websites would produce better ranking of results; opposite of what other search engines where providing at the time. This process originally involved the number of times a keyword search phrase would appear in the content of a website. Today Google has set precedence in the field of search which is followed by many today.
MSN Search
Live Search allows webmasters to manage the web crawling status of their own websites through Live Search Webmaster Center. Formerly known as msn search, Live provides search portal that was developed to compete with the industry leaders Google and Yahoo!
Yahoo
Yahoo! was created in January 1994 by Stanford graduate students Jerry Yang and David Filo. The original name of their website was “Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web”. In Yahoo!’s first year they received over 1 million hits and took advantage of a huge business potential with a diverse selection web services.
AOL Search
American Global Internet Services and Media Company is operated by Time Warner. With headquarters in New York, New York, its global reach has allowed them to franchise its web services to nations around the world.
Netscape
Netscape.com is presently an AOL duplicate of the AOL.com portal, which features facilities such as news, search, sports, horoscopes, dating, movies, music and more.
Open Directory
Open Directory Project, A.K.A DMOZ is worldwide open content directory of website links, sumbited by users; that is developed and managed by community volunteer editors. The ODP uses human editors instead of computer bots to group themed websites and approve them for categorical display.
HotBot
HotBot is one of the first internet search engine providers. It went live in 1996 as a service from “Wired Magazine”. Its original attraction to users was their frequent database updates resulting in fresher search results. Today the search portal is a front-end to major search engines such as Ask.com and MSN.
Ask
Ask Jeeves was originally developed to allow visitors to get answers to everyday questions. Ask.com was the first search engine to provide question/answering queries for web users. Ask is also a traditional keyword searching engine and is known to many to be very user-friendly.
About
About.com is dynamic content driven force that keeps information about unlimited topics from gardening to technology. They provide content through their network of over 500 journalists (Guides) which are experts in the field they write about. All this free information is provide through an easy search features.
ixquick
Ixquick began in 2004 and has provided over 120 million searches over the past 3 years. This metasearch engine returns the top ten results from multiple search engines by using a “Star System” to rank its results. It awards one star for every search result that’s been returned for a web site, in return giving the site with the most visits, a higher ranking.
WebCrawler
WebCrawler provides users the top search results from Google, Yahoo!, MSN Search, Ask.com, About.com, MIVA, LookSmart and other frequently used search engines. They also offer searches for video, audio, images, news, and general information on a variety of catagories. WebCrawler is subsidiary of Infospace, Inc.
AltaVista
AltaVista originaly had two innovations that set it apart from other Internet Search Engines. First was it used a multi-threaded crawler (named “Scooter”) which allowed it to crawl an enormous amount of web pages. Second it relied on advanced and sophisticated hardware which allowed its backend to out-speed the rest. Today AltaVista is well known for a free translation service, called Babel Fish, which automatically translates text between several languages.
All the Web
AlltheWeb.com is a search engine that was started in 1994. It was one of the first enterprise level search engines in terms of size and technology but never rivaled against its competitors Google and Yahoo. AlltheWeb was subsequently taken over by Yahoo! and now used its search database.
Gigablast
Gigablast was developed as a high capacity search mechanism capable of indexing a high number of web pages per server. Gigablast has about 10 Billion web pages in its database and is host to millions of queries per day. It also has the ability to search a variety of languages.
Excite
Excite is known as one of the 90’s original “dotcoms” with a huge branding value. Today Excite offers mail service, integrated stock quotes, customizable membership pages and search content that is made up of over 100 different sources.
Want to learn more?
As of May 2008 Google holds a major stake in Internet Search with Yahoo! coming in second and Live hitting the third most popular, in terms of users. There are countless resources on the internet related to search engines and everything from their history to modern day sophistication is very interesting.