A brief history of search engines
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- In 1990,
- In 1993,
- In 1994,
- In 1995,
- In 1996,
- In 1997,
- In 1998,
- In 1999,
- In 2000,
- In 2001,
- In 2002,
- In 2003,
- In 2004,
- In 2005,
- In 2006,
- In 2007,
- In 2009,
- In 2010,
- In 2011,
- In 2012,
- In 2013,
- In 2014,
With the development of the Internet, the emergence of search engines is inevitable. Just like the traditional library, the collection of books, documents, management, search will inevitably be difficult, index and search will become necessary. In fact, search engine theory is largely derived from traditional file retrieval technology.
The amount of online resources is far beyond our personal imagination and control, without search engines, we can hardly effectively use these resources, and there is no Internet today.
Nowadays, social media is in the ascendancy. The number of users, website traffic and social influence of applications such as Weibo, wechat, Facebook and Twitter have reached or even exceeded those of Internet giants such as Baidu and Google. There is a tendency and a view that Internet users now look for information more on Twitter, Facebook and Twitter than on search engines. Maybe search engines are obsolete?
Seos don’t have to worry. Perhaps Google, Baidu will decline, will disappear, but the search engine will not. Even if weibo, WeChat, Facebook, Twitter, or what new network after service, the user to search for information, as you want to enter between the key in the search box, or in accordance with the brigade in the era of mobile Internet voice input, this is the search, search information source may only included the page from the search engines to according to the library becomes rich, In the internal databases of Facebook and Twitter, the ranking algorithm has changed from page relevance and links to the recommendation degree and comments of members and friends. However, the change of data source and algorithm cannot change users’ need for search function, nor will it change the basic form of search.
As long as search exists, there will be which piece of information in front of the problem, there will be the existence of SEO. Maybe the name of the search engine has changed, SEO just needs to change its name.
Search is one of the fastest changing areas of the Internet in the last 20 years. This kind of change is not only reflected in the search technology advances by leaps and leaps and the huge impetus to the network economy, the search engine itself is also wonderful, often dazzling, jaw-dropping feeling.
Understanding the history of search engine development can help SEO personnel understand the development and transformation of search engine marketing, and have a more accurate forecast of the future. This section briefly lists the important events in the history of search engines, many of which have had a significant impact on the shape of the search and SEO industry today.
In 1990,
Archie, the first Internet search engine, appeared to search for files on FTP servers. The Http-based Web had not yet emerged.
In 1993,
June
The first Wcb search engine, World Wide Web Wanderer, only collected Web addresses and did not index file content.
On October
The second Web search engine, ALIWEB, has started indexing file meta-information (that is, information such as title tags), but has not yet indexed file body content.
In 1994,
In January
Infoscek was created, and its search service was officially launched later. Infoseek was one of the most important early search engines that allowed webmasters to submit web sites from Infoseek. Robin Li, baidu’s founder, is one of Infoseek’s core engineers.
April
Yahoo! It was founded by David Filo and Jerry Yang. The Yahoo. conl domain was not registered at that time, and the site was built on Stanford University’s domain name. Yahoo! Originally not a real search engine, but a manually edited directory of websites, the founders personally collected valuable sites listed in Yahoo! Directory. When the number of websites is not large, manual editing can be realized, which not only provides users with convenience, but also promotes the quality of information. It quickly grew into an Internet giant.
The first full-text search engine (indexing the entire contents of files) WetCrawler was launched. It started as a research project at the University of Washington. It was acquired by AOL in 1995 and by Exie in 1996. In 2001, the site stopped developing its own search technology and became a metasearch engine.
June
Lycos was founded and quickly became one of the most popular search engines
In 1995,
In January
Yahoo.com city name registration. In April, the Yahoo! The company was officially established.
On December
The Excitc search engine is one of the early and most popular search engines. Its parent company went bankrupt in 2001 and was bought by InfoSpace. It was acquired by Ask Jeeves in 2004.
AltaVista was created and quickly became the most popular search engine, the Google of its day.
AltaVista has done a lot of pioneering work in search, and page ranking is based on site factors. Webmaster submitted the site included very quickly.
Infoseek became the default search engine for Netscape browsers. Netscape, the dominant browser market at the time, had more than 90% of the market. It declined with the release of Microsoft’s free Internet Explorer browser and officially ceased development and technical support in 2008.
In 1996,
march
Google began as a Stanford University research project of founders Lary Page and Sergey Brin as BackRub, before changing its name to Google in 1997.
April
Yahoo! On the market.
On may
Inkomi was founded and was an important early provider of search technology. There is no search site or interface for users, but search technology for other companies. Inkomi was the first to pay for inclusion, but Google and others proved it impossible.
Hotbot started using Inktomi data. It was acquired by Lycos in 1998 and later transformed into a metasearch engine that displays results from Google.fast, Teoma and Inktomi. It was also one of the first popular search engines.
In November,
Lyeos collected 60 million files, making it the largest search engine at the time. Compared to today’s search engine databases, it’s a small fry.
In 1997,
April
Ask Jeeves. Launched, renamed Ask in 2006, is the only early search engine that still exists and has some market share. It was billed as featuring “natural language” searches, which users could search in sentences. At first it was clear (at least today) that the manual editing of search results with a large number of editors was not working, and then data from other search engines had to be used.
In 1998,
On February 21st
GoTo (later renamed Overture) officially launched Pay For Placemnent, a service that puts those who Pay the most in front of the queue. Much maligned at the time, it became the ancestor of paid search advertising (Baidu Promotion, Google Adwords, etc.), the most important revenue source for all major search engines. The creation of Direet hits, in which user clicks to search results were an important part of the ranking factor, made Direet hits popular for a while, but soon led to a sharp decline in search quality. Today’s search engine algorithm to introduce user browsing data, as early as in the early search engine exploration and left a lesson, bad processing, will be used by cheaters.
In mid-1998, Disney became Ifosek’s holding company, transforming Infoseck into a portal. Early search engines do not have a clear profit model, when they encounter difficulties such as search quality decline and no income, they often adopt the method of transforming into a portal, hoping for Yaboo! That makes money from online display advertising, but there are few successful examples. This for Google and other latecomers insist on improving the search technology, adhere to the simple search core business provided a precedent.
Also in 1998. AltaVista was sold to Compaq. In October 1999, Compaq also converted AltaVista into a portal, and AltaVista went into decline.
In 1998, Yaboo! Drop AlaVista, which has been in use since 1996, and use Inkomi’s search data instead. Early Yloo only displayed data from real search engines when there was no site the user was looking for in its directory.
On September
Google was officially founded.
MSN Search launched. For a long time, though, Microsoft didn’t take Search seriously, until 2004, when MSN Search used Search data and technology from other providers.
In 1999,
On may
AllTheWeb.com was created as a platform for search technology company FAST to showcase its technology.
June
Netscape’s decision to abandon Exciter and start using Google to search for purple data was a milestone for Google.
Infoseck, a once-popular search engine, disappeared in mid-1999 when Disney diverted Infoseek traffic to Go.com. Go.com has gone through many twists and turns and is now silent.
Lycos stopped its own search technology and started using AIlTheWeb data.
In 2000,
In January
Aak Jeeves paid $500m for Direct Hit, a search engine, but did not take it any further. Direct Hit officially ended in early 2002.
January 18: Baidu was founded. As a search technology provider, Qiwu provides Chinese search services and data to other websites.
On may
Lycos was acquired by Spanish company Terra Networks and renamed Tera Lycos. Terra Lycos has been on the wane since the dotcom bubble burst.
In July
Yahoo! He began to use Google search data to cultivate the most powerful competitors in the future with his most powerful online brand and traffic.
In the middle of 2000, GoTo.com basically gave up the practice of attracting users with its own website and began to provide paid search services to a number of search engines and websites, including MetaCrawler.com, DogPile.com, Ask Jeeves, AOL,Netscape and so on. This may have been one of GoTo.com’s (later Overture) major missteps, a pioneering model whose brand name was not recognized by the average user and thus could not compete with a household name like Google.
On October
Google launched AdWords, a CPM, or pay-per-display, search advertising service. The model was not successful.
In 2001,
On September
Ask Jeeves’ acquisition of Teoma, a search engine that puts as much emphasis on links as Google, was once considered one of the search engines that could compete with Google.
On October
Baidu as a search engine officially online, directly independent search services. Chinese search quickly entered the Era of Baidu.
In 2002,
march
Google Adwords introduced PPC, or pay per click, as the mainstream Adwords today. PPC search advertising was invented by Overure and expanded by Coogle. Since PPC, Google Adwords has really been accepted and widely used by customers, and Google has become an online money-making machine that takes full advantage of search.
On may
AOL ditched Inktomi and started using Google to search for data.
On October
Yahoo! Forgo returning Yahoo! The practice of data in the directory is completely changed to display Google search data. Yahoo! The directory is still the most important website directory, but it is clear that there are fewer and fewer users.
On December
Yahoo! The acquisition of Inktomi, which had struggled with a profitable business model, was the prelude to a series of acquisitions and consolidations in 2003. Yahoo! They obviously want to have their own search technology, rather than continue to rely on other search engines like Google
In 2003,
On February 18th
Overture announced the acquisition of AltaVista. In addition to its advertising platform, Overture also has its own search technology.
On February 25
Overture announced the acquisition of the search technology division of FAST, which owns AllTheWeb.com and also provides search data to another prominent search site, Lyoos.
Oveture thus owned the two major search technology companies of the time.
march
Coogle launched what became known as Adsense, a content advertising system that served ads to other content sites and became a major source of revenue for many content sites
In July
Yahoo! Announced its $1.6 billion acquisition of Overture, bringing under its umbrella nearly every major search technology except Google’s (Inkomi.Alavista.Fast). Unfortunately, as soon as 2010 Yahoo! Ditching its own search technology for Microsoft’s Bing service, Yahoo! The previous acquisition and their own research and development on this basis for many years of search technology is dead. Overture’s PPC advertising platform was consolidated and renamed Yahoo! Seurch Marketing. In 2003, Microsoft MSN began to develop its own search engine technology. Previously,MSN sites used search data from search technology providers such as Inkomi.
In 2004,
On February
As everyone expected, Yahoo! After acquiring several major search companies, he launched his own search engine without using Google data and technology.
In August
Google listed.
In November,
Microsoft has launched its own Search engine, MSN Search. It no longer uses third-party Search services. The beginning of the Triumvirate.
In 2005,
In August
Baidu went public.
In 2006,
On may
Microsoft launched AdCenter, an advertising system similar to Google’s Adwords.
On September
MSN Search renamed Live Search, in fact, MSN network brand changed to Live, and do a lot of promotion. But it hasn’t significantly increased Microsoft’s share of the search market, and Google is still dominant.
In 2007,
march
Google is also starting to offer pay-per-conversion ads similar to affiliate sites. In April, Google bought DoubleClick, a traditional online advertising company, to move into a broader range of online advertising.
In 2009,
June
Microsoft Live Search changed its name to Bing.
On July 29th
Microsoft and Yahoo! In a historic deal, Yahoo! Will gradually abandon its own search technology and use Bing data. A few years earlier, Yahoo! Always push stuck in the predicament, CEO several replacement, major shareholders neijiang, search market share continues to decline. Finally, the Yahoo! Was defeated in the search war by Google. Yahoo! Was a hero, but Yahoo! The era is officially over.
In 2010,
August 25
Yahoo! Start using Bing to search for data.
In 2011,
On February 24
Google launched Panda updates designed to reduce the number of low-quality pages in search results. Until September 2014, Google. 27 Panda updates have been launched. Panda update has a profound impact on the SEO industry.
In 2012,
On April 24
Google launches Penguin algorithm to combat cheating links and low quality links. Since then, Google has continued to release new versions of penguin algorithm. Until October 2014, When Penguin 3.0 was launched, Google has launched 6 penguin updates.
In August
360 launched 360 Search and rapidly increased its search market share in China based on the market share of its browser.
In November,
Baidu webmaster platform launched outside the chain query function, truly make Baidu webmaster platform become China webmaster must use SEO tools.
In 2013,
On February 20
Baidu has launched an algorithm to crack down on websites involved in link buying and selling.
On may
Baidu launches pomegranate algorithm to crack down on low quality content pages.
June
Yahoo! Closed AltaVista when red pole is turned off.
In July
Baidu launched Luoluo 2.0, continue to fight against spam links, this time the focus is advertorials.
In August
Google introduced hummingbird algorithm, which is a rewrite of the entire ranking algorithm.
In 2014,
On September
Four years after abandoning its own search technology, Yahoo! Announced that even the directory of websites on which he built his business was closed by the end of 2014.