The first search engines

Early days of structuring and finding content

Even before the World Wide Web was born, people understood the information being published on the Internet needed to be structured for others to be able to find it.

In the late 1980s, Apple Computer, Dow Jones, KPMG and the less known Thinking Machines Corp developed and launched the Wide Area Information Server (WAIS), a client-server text searching system, to let users be able to search index databases on remote computers, including full-text searches similar to the capability later provided by search engines.

Thinking Machines Corp provided a service called the Directory of Servers, which was basically a WAIS server, containing metadata together with keywords describing the indexed pages. A very early search service in other words. WAIS also powered Whois++, a substitution for the to this day heavily used ‘whois’ service to look up names and other relevant domain information.

Fun-fact: Two of the founders of WAIS, Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat, later went to found the Internet Archive, as well as Alexa Internet, which was later acquired by Amazon.

As the amount of documents being published on the World Wide Web continued to increase every day, the need for more user-friendly search services to find the content one was looking for became more and more important.

Those of us who have been lucky enough to experience the very first years of the World Wide Web surely remember how we back then found good and relevant web pages; by reading computer magazines, which all mentioned hundreds of web pages. Some magazines even included CD-ROM’s, filled with link archives to interesting web pages. We even had to make the guess work out of it some times, and gently cross our fingers before trying various domain names to see if they resolved.

Put in other words, the need for a search engine that structured all the content on the World Wide Web and made the content easily available was most definitely required as soon as possible.

The first search engines arrives

In 1994, when around 10% of the world population in the developed world had some sort of access to the Internet, the very first search engines appeared.

The W3Catalog, launched on September 2, 1993 and developed by Oscar Nierstrasz at the University of Genova, is considered to be the very first search engine, although very primitive.

In December 1993, the Computing Science graduate from Scarborough, England, Jonathon Fletcher, released JumpStation, the very first what we today call a fully featured World Wide Web search engine, able to combine all the three essential features of a web search engine; crawling, indexing and searching. Jonathon Fletcher has subsequently been named «father of the search engine».

In the years go come, dozens of fully featured, commercially-driven, search engines was launched.

Infoseek (1994-1999), Excite (1995-), Lycos (1995-) and Go.com (1994-2001) was some of the very first to appear, with Yahoo! (1995-), AltaVista (1995-2013), AskJeeves (1996-) and Yandex (1997-) being released the following years.

Most of the early days’ search engines actually still exists today, but for the most they don’t serve any value to users wanting to find relevant information, and the level of usage of most of these search engines except of Yahoo! is in practice non-existing.