The History of Some Search Engines

Yahoo’s History

Yahoo has been founded by David Filo and Jerry Yang, Ph.D. candidates in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. The Web site started out as "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web" but eventually received a new moniker with the help of a dictionary. The name Yahoo! is an acronym for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle," but Filo and Yang insist they selected the name because they liked the general definition of a yahoo: "rude, unsophisticated, uncouth." Yahoo! itself first resided on Yang's student workstation, "Akebono," while the software was lodged on Filo's computer, "Konishiki" - both named after legendary sumo wrestlers. Later on, Yahoo! celebrated its first million-hit day in the fall of 1994, translating to almost 100 thousand unique visitors. Realizing their new company had the potential to grow quickly, Jerry and David began to shop for a management team. They hired Tim Koogle, a veteran of Motorola and an alumnus of the Stanford engineering department, as chief executive officer and Jeffrey Mallett, founder of Novell's WordPerfect consumer division, as chief operating officer. They secured a second round of funding in Fall 1995 from investors Reuters Ltd. and Softbank. Yahoo! launched a highly-successful IPO in April 1996 with a total of 49 employees. And as the years go by, Yahoo became more popular and still in progress!

Google’s History

Google began as a research project in January 1996 by Larry Page, a Ph.D. student at Stanford.[1] Larry was soon joined in his research project by Sergey Brin a fellow Stanford Ph.D. student and close friend. Larry Page hypothesized that a search engine that analyzed the relationships between websites would produce better results than existing techniques (existing search engines at the time essentially ranked results according to how many times the search term appeared on a page).[2] It was originally nicknamed, "BackRub", because the system checked backlinks to estimate a site's importance.[3] A small search engine called RankDex was already exploring a similar strategy.Convinced that the pages with the most links to them from other highly relevant Web pages must be the most relevant pages associated with the search, Page and Brin tested their thesis as part of their studies, and laid the foundation for their search engine. Originally the search engine used the Stanford website with the domain google.stanford.edu. The name Google is a play on the term googol, which is the large number 10100. The domain google.com was registered on September 15, 1997. They formally incorporated their company, Google Inc., on September 7, 1998 at a friend's garage in Menlo Park, California. Google received a big break in 1999 when one of the most popular search engines, AltaVista, relaunched itself as a user web entry point, or portal. This unexpected change alienated part of AltaVista's user base. Google quickly outgrew its University Avenue home. The company settled into a complex of buildings, called the Googleplex in Mountain View in 1999. Silicon Graphics leased these buildings to Google. And Google became popular!

Lycos’ History

Lycos came online in 1994 as a search engine, and has since acquired HotBot, Raging Bull, Tripod, Wired, as well as others.. Lycos has changed from a search engine to more of a Yahoo! style directory. The Lycos.com portal includes a news, shopping, search, directory, personalized, and topics section, just as Yahoo! does. It attempts to offer it's users enough content and options to keep them at the site for extended periods of time. Enough about the portal, let's get to the search results. There have been changes to the way Lycos runs it search engine lately. The web site submission and payment options have changed as well, but we will discuss that later in the article. Lycos search results resemble many that we have looked at in the past. The current results that are displayed is dependant upon the search that is performed, just as with the past portals, but you can expect to see Overture results, Lycos's own paid results, and results from Fast/AllTheWeb.com. It became one of the popular search engines today!

Excite’s History

Ben Lutch and Martin Reinfried. The founders were all students in computer science (except for Kraus, who was a political science major) at Stanford University. In July 1994 International Data Group paid $100,000 to the team to develop an online service.In January 1995 Vinod Khosla, (also a former student of Stanford) a partner at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, arranged $250,000 first round backing with $1.5 million in ten months. In addition Geoff Yang, of Institutional Venture Partners, brought in $1.5 million in financing. It took another year, until December 1995, to launch Excite on the Web.In January 1996 George Bell joined Excite as their Chief Executive Officer. Later that year the company bought two search engines, Magellan and WebCrawler, and went public on April 4, 1996 with an initial offering of two million shares priced at $8.50; just seven days before Yahoo!'s initial public offering on April 11, 1996, placing 2.6 million shares of common stock at $13.50 per share. It gained exclusive distribution agreements with companies such as Netscape, Microsoft, and Apple Computer. Days moves on, it excites us more!

Altavista’s History

AltaVista, which means "a view from above," was inspired by the creation of big ideas from a team of experts with a fascination for keeping track of information. During the spring of 1995, scientists at Digital Equipment Corporation's Research lab in Palo Alto, CA, devised a way to store every word of every HTML page on the Internet in a fast, searchable index. This led to AltaVista's development of the first searchable, full-text database on the World Wide Web. Other notable AltaVista inventions include the first-ever multi-lingual search capability on the Internet and the first search technology to support Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages. We are proud of Babel Fish, the Web's first Internet machine translation service that can translate words, phrases or entire Web sites to and from English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian and Russian. Later on, still in improving!

Hotbot’s History

Another powerful search engine had its genesis in yet another university research project. Eric Brewer and assistant professor at the University of California at Berkeley and Paul Gauthier, a computer science graduate student working on a computer science PhD, started work demonstrating that a cluster of small computers could achieve the same computing performance as a large supercomputer. They set about to commercialize this work and founded Inktomi (ink-to-me) Corporation in February 1996. Just three months later, they unleashed the HotBot search engine and quickly licensed it to one of the hottest web sites around, Wired Magazine’s Hotwired.com.Hotbot proved itself to be one of the most powerful search engines of its day, with a spider capable of indexing 10 million pages a day. This meant HotBot not only had the most up to date list of available new sites and pages, but was capable of re-indexing all previously indexed pages to ensure they were all up to date as well

Go's History

Go.com historically provided a good range of search capabilities, but outsourced the work to another search engine.
Overture was the search engine that originally powered Go.com, and it has used other search engines including Yahoo.