Search Engine History Timeline

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Let’s move a little back into history and know more about the earlier search engines that existed before Google. This search engine history timeline will enable you to get a good grasp over the old and new search engine technologies.

1963 – Ted Nelson coined the terms “hypertext” and “hypermedia” and launched the first hypertext project “Project Xanadu“.

1994-1995 – Gerald Salton is regarded as the “Father of Modern Search Technology“. He published various publications related to machine readable texts, theory of indexing, automatic text decomposition, automatic query expansion etc.

1994 – Web Crawler was launched. It was created by Brian Pinkerton. It was the first search engine to provide full text search. Currently it is working as a meta search engine and is owned by Blucora/Infospace.

  – Yahoo was launched by Jerry Yang and David Filo. It stands for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle.”

– Lycos was launched by Bob Davis. It provides a fun way to search with information categorized into various subcategories in the home page itself.

    – Metacrawler was launched by Erik Selberg, Bobby Kalili, and Professor Oren Etzioni.

    – Infoseek was launched by Steve Kirsch. It has now been acquired by Walt Disney and renamed Go.com. It no longer serves as a search engine.

1995 – Excite was launched. It is an internet portal providing similar services as Yahoo. It was founded by  Graham Spencer, Joe Kraus, Mark Van Haren, Ryan McIntyre, Ben Lutch and Martin Reinfried.

– Altavista was launched. Currently it is owned by Yahoo but unfortunately Yahoo shut down its operation on July 8th, 2013.

1996 – Hotbot was launched. It is still serving as a search engine and is operated by lycos.

– Dogpile was launched. Currently it is working as a meta search engine and is owned by Blucora/Infospace.

– AskJeeves was launched by Garrett Gruener and David Warthen. It was later renamed as “Ask.com“

1997 – Google was launched by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Since its launch, it has constantly remained the number 1 search engine of the world. The success of Google was largely due to its ability to present more relevant and faster results as compared to the other search engines. It follows the motto of “Don’t be Evil” and has a mission of organizing the world’s information and making it universally accessible.

1999 – AlltheWeb was launched but it closed on 2011. It was acquired by Yahoo! and now gets redirected to the Yahoo! home page.

– Yandex was launched by Arkady Volozh Arkady Borkovsky Ilya Segalovich. It is the most popular search engine in Russia and one of the top 5 search engines of this world.

2000 – Baidu, the Chinese search engine was launched by Robin Li. Baidu is the most popular search engine in China and has over 20,000 employees working for it. It ranks in top 5 search engines of the world.

2009 – Bing was launched by Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer. It is one of the newest search engines in the market that is gaining popularity in the US.