Search engine technology in history

In the past many search engines have been created to help users find desired information on the web.

Search engines existed even before the invention of the World Wide Web. The roots of web search engine technology are in information retrieval (IR) systems, which can be traced back to the work of Luhn at IBM during the late 1950s.

Search tools such as Archie and Veronica searched using FTP and gopher protocols long before HTTP came into play.

Search technology was very primitive. With Archie one could search for file names, while with Veronica, one could search for text files and file names.

The 1990s was the decade of the World Wide Web, built over the physical infrastructure of the internet, radically changing the availability of information and making possible the rapid dissemination of digital information across the globe.

By the mid-1990s, many thousands of pages were being added to the World Wide Web each day.

The availability of graphical browsing programs such as Mosaic, Netscape, and Microsoft Internet Explorer made it easy for ordinary PC users to view web pages and to navigate from one page to another.
Search engine technology in history