Search Engine Flashback
February 3rd, 2008 by
Andreas from Xavier Media
Yesterday I wrote about Microsofts bid on Yahoo and started thinking about all search engines we’ve seen over the 10-15 years. Do you remember them all? Well, here’s a flashback for you (I know there are many more search engines, but I can’t write about them all 
).
Altavista
Altavista was developed by Digital Equipment Corporation and saw the daylight in December 1995. In the beginning altavista.digital.com was used as domain name for the search engine. As of 1998, it used 20 multi-processor machines using DEC’s 64-bit Alpha processor. Each machine had 130 GB of RAM, 500 GB of hard disk space and received 13 million queries per day. During this time Altavista was the biggest and only search engine worthy the name Eveyone (with a few exceptions of course) used Altavista. In 1999 when Digital was acquired by Compaq the name www.altavista.com was purchased from AltaVista Technology Incorporated for amazing 3.3.million dollar (it was an amazing amount in 1999). In February 2003 Altavista was purchased by Overture Services, Inc and in October the same year Overture (including Altavista) was acquired by Yahoo.
Yahoo!
One of the first and biggest directories (and later also search engines) was founded in 1994 (the domain name www.yahoo.com was registered in January 1995). In the beginning Yahoo was only a simple directory of links categorized in categories (very similar to DMOZ) while the search engine results was provided by Altavista since 1996. During the year 1997-1999 Yahoo and other directories grow rapidly and new services was released almost daily. Yahoo acquired Rocketmail in 1997 from Four11 (now Yahoo! Mail), web hosting provider GeoCities in 2000 and eGroups in mid 2000 (now Yahoo Groups). In 2005 photo sharing service Flickr, blo.gs, online social event calendar Upcoming.org and social bookmark site del.icio.us joined the Yahoo family of services.
Excite
In 1994 International Data Group a group of students at Stanford University $100 000 to develop an online service and in December 1995 Excite was born. In 1996 Magellan and WebCrawler was bought, and Excite signed a distribution deal with Netscape, Microsoft, Apple, and some other companies. Later that year Excite went public. Yahoo negotiated to purchase Excite in 1998, but @Home Network took control over Excite in early 1999 instead. In 2001 Excite@Home collapsed and the company had to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. During the cllapse iWon.com started developing a new Excite portal and was able to get their hands on excite.com. iWon.com later changed it’s corporate name to Excite Networks.
Lycos
Lycos stared its days in 1994 as a search engine research project by Dr. Michael Loren Mauldin (the domain name www.lycos.com was registered in 1995). In 1999 Lycos was the most visited online destination in the world and had a local presence in 40 countries world-wide. Lycos merged with Spanish Terra Networks in 2000, but that wasn’t a happy “marrige” so in 2004 they went separate ways. Lycos became once again Lycos, Inc. when it was acquired by Korean Daum Communications Corporation after the split with Terra. During the year Lycos acquired a couple of popular web services like web hosting companies Angelfire and Tripod.com, search engine HotBot and people search engine WhoWhere.com.
Students from Stanford University seems to like searching because Google is also a product by students from SU . Google started as a research project in 1996 and was incorporated in 1998. In the beginning the search engine used google.stanford.edu as domain name but in 1997 they finally got www.google.com instead. In 2001 Google started acquiring several small companies with innovative technology. One of them where Pyra Labs (Blogger.com) and another where Upstartle, the creators of Writely (now Google Docs & Spreadsheets). The two most famous acquisitions must be YouTube.com that Google got in 2006 for the small sum of US$1.65 billion and DoubleClick in 2007 for US$3.1 billion.
DMOZ - Open Directory Project
DMOZ actually not a search engine but only a directory. It was founded in 1998 under the name Gnuhoo, but had to change to NewHoo. After complaints from Yahoo! the directory had to change name again, and again before they finally settled for the Open Directory Project. Netscape acquired the directory project in October 1998 and Netscape itself was acquired by AOL shortly thereafter. According to unofficial estimates the number of URLs in the directory project surpassed the Yahoo! Directory in April 2000. The lack of advertisements on the site is one of the things that makes Dmoz so fantastic. One other thing is the number of volunteering editors that helps making the directory what it is.
A big thanks to Wikipedia.org and WayBack Machine for all the information used in this post.
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February 4th, 2008 at 4:37 am
Wow, fun walk down search engine lane!
I haven’t thought about Altavista, Excite or Lycos in I don’t know when, but I definitely remember when they were the big dogs on the block.
Perhaps Microsoft should enlist some of these Standford students….YEAH, I SAID IT, LOL!
The new car smell has worn off of Bill Gates. He knows what it is to be a college wonder. Before Google gets too far into the stratosphere, they better find a couple of new boy wonders.
February 5th, 2008 at 2:22 am
Well Google is taking over the Internet, but they are smart enough to do that!
February 13th, 2008 at 12:47 am
Google wishes they were taking over the internet - it’s only borrowed.
Thats what I love about the internet - it’s free no matter how hard a company tries to corner it.
Those images bring me flashbacks of when I launched my first site - I spent SOOO much time trying to figure out what made them rank a site well.