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The
Evolution and Revolution of Search Engines by: Steve Bis
Search
Wars! Battle of the Major Search Engines by: Steve Bis
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The
Evolution and Revolution of Search Engines
by: Steve Bis
Search engines, where would we be
without them? Within the past 10-15 years the internet has become a huge
part of every day American life. Many people nowadays cannot remember the
time prior to having this wonderful information highway we call the internet.
The internet has really revolutionized the way people live their lives;
for example, you can bank online, buy just about anything you want online,
meet new people online, and even find local movie times. However, one of
the biggest benefits of the internet is the use of search engines. At any
moment in time you may have a question, or an urge to get more information
about a certain topic and that information can be easily attained through
a search engine. In this article I am going to give you a brief history
on the evolution of the search engine, and show you how they truly have
revolutionized our lifestyles.
The history of search engines is
the story of university students’ projects evolving into commercial enterprises
and revolutionizing the field as they went. The first attempt at creating
a search engine was called Archie, and it was created in 1990 by Alan Emtage,
a student at McGill University. This very primitive search engine did not
use any robot technology. All Archie really did was just become a database
of archived filenames, which it would try to match with users’ queries.
The next evolutionary step of the
search engine was the introduction of “robots.” The first use of robot
technology was in the search engine World Wide Web Wanderer. Simply what
robots would do is scan the internet for URL’s, starting at one site and
using the links in the previous site to find more sites. The problems with
these first robots were that if they were not written properly they would
cause too many hits on a server decaying the systems performance.
To combat these initial problems
Martjin Koster came out with the first web directory called “Aliweb” in
October 1993. Web directories are different than search engines because
the sites listed in them are not from automated robots, but rather from
human editors reviewing sites and placing them in the directory.
However, shortly after, in December
1993, a new robot was born. This was called the “spider.” Spiders added
a much further degree of accuracy by indexing the entire text of a webpage.
The older robots only indexed the URL and titles of a page, which meant
that some pertinent keywords might not be indexed. This greatly improved
the relevancy rankings of their results, and thus was the first major step
in forming the major search engines that we have all become so used to
using today.
Not long after the spider, we saw
the emergence of some of the big guns. In 1994, out of Stanford University
came the extremely famous Yahoo. The two guys who started Yahoo were students,
David Filo and JerryYang. Basically, at first Yahoo was just a list of
these guys’ favorite websites. But soon, due to its easy user-friendly
interface, became the most popular web directory. Due to the fact that
its websites were all human reviewed, Yahoo was only able to index about
1% of the web. At this time, Altavista became the fastest growing search
engines using the spider technology and was indexing up to 10 million pages
a day.
By this time there are two different
types of search engines, “author controlled” such as Altavista and Excite,
in which results were ranked by keyword relevancy, and “editor controlled”
such as Yahoo, in which humans manually placed websites into their index.
Then in late 1997 out of Stanford
University was born the most popular and well-known search engine to date:
GOOGLE Google has a different way of ranking its websites. It used a Pagerank
system. Simply what they did was list websites higher in their results
based on how many links were pointing to a particular site. Of course,
the content on the page had to be relevant to the keyword typed into the
search box. But basically, Google invented what you could call a system
of voting. So a site with numerous backlinks or votes would rank higher.
A backlink is just when someone else puts a link on their site that points
to another outside site. Jump forward to today and Google has more than
80% of the websites on the internet in their index, which is pretty impressive.
Search engines have had a huge impact
on the American lifestyle. They basically will grant you just about any
information you want, all you have to do is type into the search box the
topic you want to find more information about. Human beings are natural
born information junkies, we always want to know more and find out more
and search engines have made this urge of ours extremely easy to cure.
Just think about it, maybe you need to fix a simple problem you have with
your car. By using a search engine to do some research you may very easily
figure the problem out, saving you a very costly trip to the car repair
shop. They are just great educational tools, before search engines emerged
if you really wanted to learn something you would go to your library and
check out a book. Now before making that trip you may find out what you
wanted by just sitting at your desktop and surfing through Google. The
list goes on about the many benefits of this great new technology we call
the search engine. I’m sure you can recall a time when you found some very
good information by using one. If you’re anything like me and find yourself
addicted to this easily accessible information highway then your making
uses of them daily.
Search engines by nature were made
very easy to use. However, with a little extra knowledge about how they
work you can really take advantage of them and find great information very
quickly. With the right knowledge of search engines and the use of specialized
tools you can literally find anything you want. And when I mean anything,
I mean ANYTHING. For me personally I am excited to see what search engines
will evolve into in the future. The sky is the limit. Who knows what type
of search spiders the future will spawn, but one thing is for sure there
will be newer and newer search technology it’s just our human nature to
keep trying to top ourselves.
About The Author
Search engine specialist Steve Bis,
is the author of the free search secrets newsletter and owns a unique web
search tool that will help you find anything on the internet in 60 seconds,
eliminating your search frustrations. http://www.ultimatesearchpro.com.
Date Posted:
November 07, 2006
Search
Wars! Battle of the Major Search Engines
by: Steve Bis
It’s pretty safe to say that anyone
who has a computer has at some point or another used a search engine. Search
engines are extremely useful creatures. They have had a major impact on
our society, I mean its pretty amazing that you can just go type in anything
you want into a search box and get back information about it in about two
seconds. Before search engines came along you pretty much had to rely on
going to the library to get more information. With that being said the
popularity of search has created quite a huge market. The advent of paid
advertising has sprung search engines into a multi-billion dollar a year
industry, thus creating some pretty stiff competition. Right now we are
in the midst of a major war on the internet, with the major players being
Yahoo, MSN, Google, and an upcoming strong contender in Ask. So you may
ask who is winning this war right now? And why? And who will take the lead
in the future? One thing is for sure the reward of being the king of the
search mountain will reap billions and billions of dollars annually.
So what are these top gun search
engines competing over? The answer is clicks, on the paid advertisements
they present every time someone uses their search engine. If you notice
when you use Google for example that at the very top of the page and on
the right hand side it says sponsored sites. This is where people trying
to make money online pay to advertise for their company. These prices range
from nickels and dimes per click, all the way up to hundreds of dollars
per click, depending on the keyword. So the main objective for a search
engine is to get as many people as possible using them to search the internet.
Just think about it for a second, the more searches they get, the more
chance of people clicking on their paid ads, which is where they make their
money. Now of course not everyone is going to click on the paid ads, only
a small percentage of the searches they receive ever actually make the
search engine money. However, with millions of searches a day it only takes
a small percentage to really make a big monetary difference.
So who are the warlords going to
battle here? And who is in the lead? The three major competitors are MSN,
Google, and Yahoo, and Ask is fighting its way back into the mix of things
with some pretty sweet search features.
As of right now Google is in the
lead, they receive somewhere in the ballpark of 80% of all search queries
on the internet. Google is estimated to gross around 3 billion dollars
in 2006, all from just paid advertisement. Now you may ask why is it that
Google is so far ahead? Well there are a few reasons. First, Google has
the most advanced algorithm, which is the mind boggling mathematical equation
that ranks and lists sites depending on the keyword. Trying to understand
their algorithm is extremely complicated, Google only hires absolute geniuses
to work for them. Second, is the brilliance of Google.com itself, which
is their homepage.
Take a look at Google’s homepage,
all you can do is type your keyword in the search box and hit search. There’s
really nothing else going on it’s pretty clean cut and user friendly, with
absolutely no distractions from getting people to do what they want. Which
is search
Now take a look at MSN, or Yahoo’s
homepage. It is just jam packed with all sorts of stuff to do from playing
games to reading articles about the news. This stuff is great and all,
however it does distract people from typing into the search box and inevitably
clicking on a paid ad putting money in their pocket. I believe this is
a major part in why Google has such a gigantic lead in the volume of searches
they receive compared to the other top guns. .
So I firmly believe that in this
case the giant will not be taken down. Even though you see commercials
for Yahoo and Ask, you know the ones with the cheesy guy screaming Yahoooo
and the monkey that Ask is featuring. The bottom line is Google has the
best algorithm right now and their site doesn’t distract people from searching,
which will yield many more search queries. Who knows though just as Google
basically came from no where and took over the market, there may be a new
kid on the block that will topple them. However as of now though they are
the reigning champions.
About The Author
Search engine specialist Steve Bis,
is the author of the free search secrets newsletter and owns a unique web
search tool that will help you find anything on the internet in 60 seconds,
eliminating your search frustrations. http://www.ultimatesearchpro.com.
This article
was posted on November 13, 2006
