In this modern day and age one cannot imagine life without the search engine. It has become an integral part for many people that they rely on to provide answers to almost all questions of their life. Some of the first web portals were online services that provided access to the web while others were search engines that enabled users to ways to find information on the web. Search engines have morphed into multi use portals where one can check emails, book travel, perform research on a multitude of things, be part of a social community and many more to name a few.
The Evolution of Search Engines
A web search engine is a software system, usually online, that is designed to search for information on the World Wide Web. A search engine can be defined as a website that helps users search for information on the World Wide Web (Battelle, 2005). The search results are mostly presented in a line of results often referred to as search engine results pages (SERPs). The information may be a mix of web pages, images, and other types of files.
The first search engine, Archie, was developed as a school project in 1990 by Alan Emtage, a student at McGill University in Montreal. In 1991, Mark McCahill, student of University of Minnesota, effectively used a hypertext paradigm and created Gopher which searched for plain text references in files. Both of these did not have text search as we see in modern days Search Engines. In 1993, Matthew Gray developed Wandex, the first search engine crawl the web indexing and searching the catalog of indexed pages on the web and allowed text based search. Another major milestone in Search Engines was achieved in 1994 when "WebCrawler" started indexing the full text of the websites instead of indexing just the titles. Soon after many companies started investing in creating their own versions of Search Engines such as Yahoo, Lycos and Infoseek in 1994, Altavista in 1995, Inktomi in 1996, AskJeeves and Google in