DID YOU KNOW?
Google can search 1000 computers and return 5million results in about 0.16 seconds. It operates over 467,000 servers and invests over $2billion a year in upgrades and development.
JUNE 30, 2008: THE WEB HAS BECOME ESSENTIAL to contemporary communications since it entered the public arena in 1993. We sometimes forget that it only a recent step in the continuing process of greater global connectivity. The internet was preceded by the age of sail, the pony express, the telegraph, post office, telephone, radio and TV.
In the beginning, the internet consisted of folders on computers linked by file transfer protocols. If you knew the address of the folder, you could download the file to view it. The first search engine, Archie, let users make simple queries. It then searched the FTP sites and created an index, which the user could view. Veronica and Gopher developed soon after.
With the advent of the web and HTML, there was an explosion of online documents. Search engines evolved to crawl through the pages and new interfaces were designed to help people enter their queries and see the results. Each engine had its own unique method for creating a database of websites, it's own methods for accepting queries and for displaying responses.
Many, like Yahoo, hired people to visit websites and categorize them manually. Part of my job as a web developer in the 90's was to submit each new site to the search engines for review.
In 1997-98 AOL, MSN and Google created databases categorizing content by keyword. They soon dominated the search engine space along with Yahoo. At the same time GoTo.com created the pay-for-click concept allowing website owners to buy space on a search engine. GoTo became Overture became Yahoo Search Marketing. Pay-per-click also generated banner advertising which made it possible to make money putting content online.
Before Google, it was relatively easy to get a good ranking on a search engine because there were so few websites online. Rank was based on age, the frequency with which a term was used on a page and meta tags.
As the web grew, such simple algorithms became useless. Millions of pages might contain the keyword while website owners loaded their meta tags with popular choices. Other factors were needed to refine the search so that the results were strictly on-topic.
Until recently, if you queried a search engine, it would collect and rank results largely on factors to do with the site itself: content, titles, links into the site, etc.
Some search engines now factor in your personal surfing habits and location to tailor results using browser history and clickstream data to recognize what you were doing online before you initiated the query. That information (your profile) is compared with aggregated data to make assumptions about the type of information you probably want.
In the newest generation of search engines, rank is determined by
1992 - Web browsers were developed for Windows, Mac, UNIX or the Amiga.
1993 - HTML goes public. AOL goes online. Mosaic becomes the de facto standard for web browsers.
1994 - HTML 2.0 released. Yahoo is created by David Filo and Jerry Yang, to track the growing number of websites
1996 - Microsoft releases Internet Explorer.