Search Engines

A search engine is intuitively engineered to deliberately search for specific data or information on the World Wide Web, net as well as FTP servers. The search results or SERP are usually represented in a list or repertoire of SERP (results) and are often called hits. The data or set information may include number of web pages, images, information, news, mail account information and other types of files or documents. Some web search engines also extract data that is available in databases/ open directories. Unlike Web directories that are executed and maintained by people or editors, search engines operate on the basis algorithms/set of instruction or are a perfect blend of algorithmic and human input. During the past development of the net or web, there was a list of web servers edited by Tim Berners-Lee and hosted on the CERN web server. The first advanced web tool used specifically for searching on the Internet was Archie. It was pensively created in 1990. The program downloaded the directory or local directory listings of all the documents or files located on public anonymous FTP sites, creating a searchable database of file names; moreover, Archie did not crawled the contents of these websites since the amount of data was sparse.

In the late summer of 1993, no search engine apparently existed for the World Wide Web, though numerous catalogues were maintained manually. Also, in June 1993, Matthew Gray, at MIT, produced what was probably the first web robot or bot or spider, the Perl-based World Wide Web Wanderer, and used it to generate an index known as 'Wandex'. The sole and primary purpose of the Wanderer was to reckon the size of the World Wide Web, which it did until late 1995.

One of the first "full text" spider or crawler-based search engines was the great WebCrawler, which came out of the veil in 1994. Unlike its predecessors, it conveniently let the global users to search for any word or phrase in any webpage that has become the standard for all major search engines. It was supposed to be the first one to be widely known by the public all across the world. In 1994, Lycos was launched successfully and became a major commercial endeavor. Soon after, many web based search engines springed and started struggling for total supremacy like Excite, Infoseek, Inktomi and AltaVista. Yahoo! was among the most popular, renowned and far more superior at that time. Global people and information seekers could also navigate the directory instead of doing a keyword or phrase -based search.

In 1996, Netscape was looking to give a single search engine as an all exclusive deal to be their featured search engine. Around 2000, the giant Google search engine rose to Podium. Google achieved sound results for many searches with an innovation known as PageRank. This ultra strong and iterative Google algorithm ranks web pages that are based on the number and PageRank of other web sites and pages that link there, on the premise that reliable and desirable pages. No doubt, Google has snatched the top most position today and continue to the rule the Web for ever.