The history of search engines dates back to 1990 when the first-ever search engine, Archie, was launched. It was created by Alan Emtage, a student of McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Archie mainly indexed FTP sites and allowed users to search for specific file names. In 1991, Tim Berners-Lee, who is credited with inventing the World Wide Web, built a web-based tool called “WWW Wanderer” which was one of the earliest web search engines.
However, it was in 1993 that the first search engine with a user-friendly interface, called “JumpStation,” was launched. JumpStation was developed by Jonathon Fletcher at the University of Stirling in Scotland. It worked by counting the number of times a specific keyword or phrase appeared in a web page and displayed the results in the order of relevance.
The first popular search engine was Yahoo, which was launched in 1994 by Jerry Yang and David Filo. Yahoo was a directory-based search engine and allowed users to browse categories and subcategories to find relevant web pages. In 1996, two computer science students, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin, created Google as part of their research project at Stanford University. Google revolutionized search engines by using a unique algorithm that calculated the relevance of a webpage based on the number and quality of inbound links.
Since then, there have been numerous search engines such as AOL Search, Bing, Ask Jeeves, and many more. Today, search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, Baidu lead the market and are used by millions of people every day to find information on the internet.
Google dominates the search engine market with around 92% market share globally which makes it the prime target search engine for SEO. Bing and Yahoo! have a combined share of around 5% and other search engines, such as Baidu and Yandex, have a smaller share mainly within their respective countries, China and Russia.
