2. The first search engine was created by Alan Emtage, a
student McGill university. His search engine was Called
"Archie". Archie worked by downloading directory
listings from files that were located on anonymous FTP
sites; Thus creating a searchable database of filenames.
As Archie was limited to filenames only, it was a year
later, in 1991, when Mark McCahill at the University of
Minnesota created "Gopher", which was able to index
plain documents. Many of the sites that were first
indexed by Gopher are now websites on the www.
3. Early search technology was very crude and innacurate.
Many search engines started catching onto linking
schemes and using them to provide accurate results. For
the longest time search engines like altavista dominated
the search engine market along with yahoo and others.
Google rose to prominence in about 2001. For Google to
have the impact that it did was justified with their
revolutionary technology and concepts including
PageRank, and link popularity. How many remote web
sites and web pages that link to a given page is taken
into consideration with PageRank, on the premise that
good or desirable pages are linked to more than others.
The PageRank of linking pages and the number of links
4. on these pages contribute to the PageRank of the linked
page. This makes it possible for Google to order its
results by how many web sites link to each found page.
Google's technology was leading, as well as their
interface which has always been very minamalist.
5. The rate at which the web grows everyday produces
large challenges for search engines, in that they cannot
possible index all of the pages, that are updating all of
the time. This is largely due to dynamically generated
pages, and creates the condition that we know as "the
invisible web".
6. With the huge money involved in search engines and the
internet, rest assured that companies like Google and
Yahoo are working hard to ensure that they can cover as
much as the web as possible, and bring it all back to you
in the form of accurate search results.
