For any internet user, search engines are apart of daily life. Obviously, Google is the current powerhouse of all search engines, but it was not always this way. At the start of the search engine movement, huge companies were not creating search engines but rather college students were.

The first tool for searching the Internet was called “Archie”. It was created by Alan Emtage, a McGill University student in 1990. Archie was a program that downloaded a listing of all files located on public anonymous File Transfer Protocals (FTP). The list was generated into a searchable database for users to access.

The next useful search tool, named “Gopher” after the University of Minnesota’s mascot, was created in 1991 by Mark McCahill. In 1993, ALIWEB was invented to allow users to submit their own webpages to be indexed on the World Wide Web. By this point, the internet was beginning to become potentially profitable. Bigger players would step into the search engine market and take a chance.

In 1993, Excite and Netscape were introduced. (Today, Excite is part of the AskJeeves company)

In 1994, Jerry Yang and David Filo created Yahoo. This was the first time that the entire text of each page was indexed. Also in 1994, WebCrawler and Lycos were made public.

In 1995, Infoseek and AltaVista began. Alta Vista was made popular by allowing multi-language searches and inquires. It was also able to provide the first multimedia search for music, videos, and pictures.

In 1996, Inktomi started.

In 1997, AskJeeves and Google were launched. Google was created by Sergey Brin and Larry Page of Stanford.

In 1998, Microsoft entered the playing field with MSN Search.

Now that it’s 2007, you already know which search engine has been the most successful throughout its venture. Google has dominated and will continue to until another search engine can offer more and/or better search results.