A Brief history of Search Engines
The evolution of search engines is a process of designing programs that help people to find information on the web quickly and efficiently. More shortly, search engines are web tools where people can find any kind of information they need with in a few seconds. For instance, if i want to buy a mobile, first i would go out and find out a mobile shop,and select a mobile which i like, and pay the price for it .Here the mobile shop is a visible place and easy to locate.
But in a internet cafe i have a computer screen in front of me, and from this screen i need to find out a mobile shop from where i can purchase a mobile I don’t have a street on my screen and need to start from somewhere, Just type in the name of the mobile shop and a .COM, it saves lot of time than just going out and finding out a shop.But what if a popular mobile shop doesnt have website with a URL?There is one and only one solution to this problem that is the search engine which is most widely used method for navigating in internet. Search engines can give you more information than just a url of a web, and it minimize the time required to find information.Once the search engine has finished searching web pages it provides a list of web sites to the user.When an internet user types a word into a search engine, they are given a list of websites that might be able to provide them with the information they seek.They also help you to locate reviews, compare the prices between the products and report problems with products or manufacturer.
The following is a very brief history of search engines:-
In The Beginning
Early File Transfer Protocol was used for uploading and downloading files.An FTP is used to transfer files from one computer to another.A user usually logs in at an FTP server to download or upload files but it does not support browsing, Because of this drawback a lot of time was wasted on searching for required information.In 1990 the very first search engine was created by students at McGill University in Montrea.The search engine was known as Archie and it was invented to index FTP archives, allowing people to quickly access specific files archives. Archie collected directory listings from public File Transfer Protocol (FTP) sites. Archie was developed to simplify keyword searching of files located at FTP servers. Nowadays, FTP is mainly used to transfer large data (huge files or many small files) from one machine to the other.Archie collected the names of all the files in an FTP site and organized them into a database that the user could search.
unlike ‘Archie’, which indexed computer files, another tool called‘Gopher’ indexed plain text documents, came into existence in 1991, and it was created by Mark McCanhill a student at the University of Minnesota.The program was named after the school’s mascot. Because these were text files, most of the Gopher sites became Web sites after the evolution of the World Wide Web(WWW).The host computers (servers) put their files in a ‘menu’ form and the menus of the different servers were merged. Now you logged into any gopher server and you could query it for information by typing in keywords and, again like Archie, you would get a list of items. But now, instead of sending yourself the list and individually looking up the items, you scrolled down the list, pressed ‘enter’ and you were transferred directly to the relevant ‘gopher’ address, where you could read the contents. Then, if you wanted, you sent the file to yourself via e-mail. Since ‘gopher’ was very useful way for storing data.Two other programs were also developed known as, “Veronica” (Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-wide index to Computerized Archives) and “Jughead,”(Jonzy’s Universal Gopher Hierarchy Excavation And Display) which searched the files stored in Gopher index systems. Veronica provided a keyword search of most Gopher menu titles in the entire Gopher listings. Jughead was a tool for obtaining menu information from various Gopher servers.
1993 a student at MIT created Wandx, the first Web search engine.
Today , a search engine match a user keyword with a list of websites that have a list of information which is needed by the user.The search engine does all these things by using a software known as crawler to identify the webpage’s that matches with the user criteria. After the crawler has identified the webpage’s, the search engine uses a variety of statistical techniques to establish each pages importance.Once the search engine has finished searching web pages it provides a list of web sites to the user. When a user types a word into the search engine they are given a list of websites that provide them with the information they only need.The typical search engine provides ten potential hits per page. The average internet user never looks farther than the second page which the search engine provides.
Ask Jeeves and Northern Light were both launched in 1997.In the same year Google was also launched by Sergey Brin and Larry Page as part of a research project at Stanford University. It uses inbound links to rank sites
In 1998 MSN Search’ and ‘Open Directory’ were also started.The‘Open Directory’ is maintained purely on human input and is global in inputs considering that a global cohort of editors maintain the site. The ‘Open Directory’ has the enviable status of maintaining the most comprehensive directory of human edited documents.
2000, a study was done by Lawrence and Giles that suggested internet search engines were only able to index sixteen percent of all available webpage’s. To provide set of matching items quickly, a search engine will typically collect metadata about the group of items through a process known as indexing. The index typically requires a smaller amount of computer storage.The search engine may store of copy of each item in a cache so that users can see the state of the item at the time it was indexed or for archive purposes or to make repetitive processes work more efficiently and quickly.