Search Engines
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Search
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SEARCH ENGINE |
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Alta
went online in late 1995. It started in
DEC's Research lab in Palo Alto, CA. The
idea for the name AltaVista originally came
from a laboratory white board that had been
partially erased. The word Alto (of Palo
Alto) was juxtaposed beside the word Vista
and someone called out, "How about
AltoVista!" which led to the name AltaVista,
meaning "The view from above."
Other notable AltaVista inventions have
included the first-ever multi-lingual search
capability on the Internet and the first
search technology to support Chinese, Japanese
and Korean languages via its translator
Babel Fish. It was the Web's first Internet
machine translation service that can translate
words, phrases or entire Web sites in English
to and from Spanish, French, German, Portuguese,
Italian and Russian. Alta also has a multimedia
search to explore the web for photos, videos
and music, with an estimated index of over
90 million multimedia objects.
AltaVista Timeline |
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April
1995 AltaVista is conceived by Digital
Equipment Corp. engineers. The idea
was to develop a software "spider"
to crawl the Web, indexing and presenting
the information it found. |
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December
1995 AltaVista launched altavista.digital.com.
As it later turned out, this was a
major blunder. |
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1996
AltaVista is provided exclusive provider
status for Yahoo. |
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1997
Aborted attempt at an IPO by Digital
(try 1). |
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1998
Digital is sold to Compaq. Many have
speculated that Digital sold it to
Compaq for a song ($1, dinner and
a movie). |
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1999
Compaq plans an IPO for Alta (try
2). |
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1999
January, Alta became a wholly owned
subsidiary of Compaq Computer Corporation.
Compaq purchased Shopping.com in March
and Zip2 Corporation in April of that
year which are also heavily laced
into the portal. |
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June
1999 Compaq pays a record $3.3million
for the domain name. Altavista.com.
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Aug
1999 AltaVista is sold to CMGI announces
IPO (try 3). All IPO’s fail.
In August of 1999, CMGI, Inc. acquired
83% of our outstanding stock from
Compaq, and Shopping.com and Zip2
became wholly owned subsidiaries of
AltaVista. Later in 1999, AltaVista
acquired Raging Bull, |
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June
2000 Flat-fee internet service in
England is announced as a Hoax. UK
Head Andy Mitchell quits saying he
wants to spend time with his family
(ya right, he was fired). |
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Nov
2000, Alta goes through two rounds
of job cutting. |
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Oct
2000 Alta chief Rod Schrock quits
saying wants to spend time with family
(ya right, he was fired). |
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They
recently added Ask Jeeves search technology in
1999 (you can now put questions to AltaVista instead
of just keywords). After serving results to Yahoo
in 1997, AltaVista briefly fed results to MSN
but now is 100% on their woo It also features
the Open Directory Project list of sites. Dumped
Looksmart directory late in 1999 and picked them
up again in mid 2000. Dumped ODP in late 1999.
AltaVista claims to have been awarded more search-related
patents (60) than any other company in the world.
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Oct
99 launched altavista.se, Swedish site |
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December
1999 altavista.co.uk, UK site |
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February
2000 altavista.fr, French site |
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March
2000 altavista.nl, Dutch site |
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April
2000 altavista.it, Italian site |
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July
2000 altavista.in, India site |
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Founders Mark Van Haren, Ryan McIntyre, Ben Lutch,
Joe Kraus, Graham Spencer, and Martin Reinfried
The five hackers and one political science major
set off at once for the Stanford library to research
the best way in which to fill the information
search-and-retrieval void. In December of 1994,
Kleiner Perkins Caulfield and Byers, and Institutional
Venture Partners invested in Excite with the purchase
of a $4000 hard drive.
Went
online in Dec 1995. In mid 1996, Excite acquired
Magellan and later in 1996 also purchased WebCrawler.
Excite also includes its directory service, Excite
Channels. In October of 1995, Architext launched
the Excite services. Exclusive distribution agreements
were signed with Microsoft Network and Netscape.
The company officially changed its name to Excite,
Inc., and soon after went public with an initial
offering of 2 million shares at $17 per share.
Users
may also search specific news stories, however
news stories are not archived and fall off of
the system within a few weeks. Developed and run
by Architext in California. It offers both keyword-based
searching and also concept-based searching (it
will not only search for the terms you type in
but also similar terms). Excite also provides
an interesting lineup of dynamic pages for various
operating systems. There is a specific display
for WebTV since webtv in rather unique - webtv
users should use the LOOK=webtv option. Non WebTV
users can try something like: this to see what
the webtv folks are seeing. Excite has lost (mid
1999) its spot as the search engine of choice
on AOL Netfind and on Netscape. Now (july 2000)
using Looksmart for directory services.
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HotBot
http://www.hotbot.com
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Went online in May 1996. HotBot was owned and
operated by Wired Magazine, but Wired Digital
was recently purchased by Lycos. Search results
are served by the Inktomi database. It formerly
used LookSmart for categorized directory of sites
listings but has switched to The Open Directory
Project in Mid 1999. Paul Gauthier and Eric Brewer
at the University of California, Berkeley, originally
created Inktomi. Hotbot also uses the Direct Hit
click through data to manipulate results.
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WebCrawler
http://www.webcrawler.com
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WebCrawler went online way back in the spring,
1994. It is another one of the search engines
that was started as a research project - this
one at the University of Washington developed
by Brian Pinkerton. AOL bought it in mid 1995
and was then bought by Excite in late 96. Although
owned by Excite, it still runs WC as a standalone
search engine. Unique in that it is the only search
engine to default to site summaries off. Webcrawler
is noted as the first major search engine to author
and use the Robots Exclusion Standard.
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Inktomi
http://www.inktomi.com
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Derived from a search engine
developed at UC Berkeley. Inktomi was founded
in 1996 by two University of California at Berkeley
researchers Eric Brewer and Paul Gauthier. Working
on a federally-funded project, the computer scientists
developed a way to achieve supercomputing power
at microcomputer prices.
The
company's name, pronounced "INK-tuh-me,"
is derived from a Lakota Indian legend about a
trickster spider character. Inktomi is known for
his ability to defeat larger adversaries through
wit and cunning.
There is an ever-changing list of Inktomi partners:
HotBot, AOL Netfind, Yahoo, ICQ, iWon, GeoCities,
Search MSN, GoTo, Snap, Aeneid, N2H2, Anzwers.au,
Goo.jp, Canada.com, RadarUol, ICQit.com Yahoo,
and Searchopolis. Inktomi is also huge in the
server cache'ing business in Europe.
Not
only noted for its powerful world wide search
engine, there also are accomplished in the powerful
technology of directory building via spidered
page results. Their directory engine uses a technology
called "Concept Induction™" to
automatically analyze and categorize millions
of documents. Concept Induction incorporates algorithms
that model human conceptual understanding of information. |
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Infoseek
http://www.infoseek.com
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(8-25-2000)
After toying with the whole site directory modle,
Infoseek still spiders occasionally. It also is
building a large directory of sites cross linked
to search results (Go Directory).
Went online in August 1995 as a directory service.
However, in late 96, a new full indexing search
engine called Ultra went online with 25million
URLS. In 1999 a 45% stake of Infoseek was purchased
by Disney and is in the process of building a
new site called GO.com. It was rumored that Infoseek
as a standalone search engine will cease with
the start of GO - that did not come to pass. Infoseek
briefly fed Cnets Search.com in 97-98.
Jan 1, 1999: Infoseek is now part of the Disney
GO network having sold a full percentage stake
to Disney. |
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Google
http://www.google.com
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Google recently (3-3-2000)
added it's page rank algorythm to a branded edition
of the Open Directory Project. On July 1, they
announced that they would become the premier provider
of search results for non-directory matches on
Yahoo.
Running as a research project at Stanford University,
Google has been online since late 1997. In mid
1999 recieved a $20 million dollar investment
of seed capital that has helped it land the top
spot on Netscapes Netcenter.
Google offers some of the most unique results
of any search engine. Using a system called PageRank,
Google filters a large portion of the irrelevant
results. It also has a builtin bias towards EDU
and GOV sites that is a refreshing change from
the other .com spam laden search engines. Google
currently lists 25million pages in its database,
and is gearing up for a major crawl to put it
over 100million pages. On Jun 3, 1999 Google received
an influx of seed capital ($25 million) from Sequoia
Captial. They have also cut their ties with Stanford
and are now operating as a competely standalone
engine. In mid 2000 they were choosen as the premier
provider of search results on Yahoo.
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Lycos
http://www.lycos.com
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Founded in January 1994, and
went online in June 1994. The name Lycos comes
from the Latin for "wolf spider.". There
are standard search results via Lycos Pro, and
categorized listings via WiseWire. Lycos was born
from a research project at Carnegie Mellon University
by Dr. Michael Mauldin. Infoseek is the first
known internet company to base its advertising
on CPM (cost per thousand page views) which in
now industry standard.
In
April 1996, Lycos, Inc. became a publicly traded
company on the NASDAQ stock market system under
the symbol LCOS. Having become a publicly traded
company just 10 months after it was founded, Lycos
holds the distinction of being the youngest company
to go public in NASDAQ history.
In April 1998, Lycos acquired WiseWire Corporation
(http://www.wisewire.com), whose was noted for
their directory building software. WiseWire now
powers the Lycos Web Guides, which are automatically
and collaboratively built via user input. Other
Lycos acquisitions.
They
recently purchased Wired Digital - acquiring HotBot
search engine in the process. It also has added
the ODP directory to it's search lineup.
After a furious acquisition spree in 98-97, Lycos
Network now consists of: Gamesville, Tripod, WhoWhere,
Lycos Communications Angelfire, Hotbot, Hotwired,
Wired News, Quote, Sonique, and Webmonkey. Offices
in: Waltham, Mass. (headquarters); New York, N.Y.;
Mountain View, Calif.; Dallas, Texas; Los Angeles,
Calif.; San Francisco, Calif.; and Chicago, Ill.
and Miami, Fla. International offices are located
in Brazil, Germany, Italy, France, Japan, Korea,
Mexico, the UK, Spain and The Netherlands. |
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Fast/AllTheWeb
http://www.alltheweb.com
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Fast or AllTheWeb.com is owned
and operated by Fast Search & Transfer ASA
technologies. It went online in mid 1998 with
one of the largest databases seen at that time.
One of their mainstays has been the development
of Multimedia specific search engines. They have
one of the largest databases of FTP urls for mp3,
wav, ra, and other multimedia filetypes available.
They fed not only FTP search results but also
webpage results to Lycos.
The
company was originally called Fast Internet Transfer.
FAST is used as an acronym for Fast Search &
Transfer. FAST is a spin-out of Opticom ASA, and
was established on July 16, 1997. Fast Search
& Transfer ASA (FAST) was formally established
in Oslo, Norway, on July 16, 1997.
Fast is also noted as the only major search engine
to currently (mid 2000) embrace PHP technology
on its home page - which is also noted as the
single coolest looking homepage of all search
engine companies. |
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Go2Net
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One
of the oldest meta search services, MetaCrawler
began in July 1995 at the University of Washington.
MetaCrawler was purchased by go2net, an online
content provider, in Feb. 97. The commercial backing
has helped improve the responsiveness of the service.
MetaCrawler now powers searches at the Go2Net
portal site. |
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Iwon
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Backed
by US television network CBS, iWon has a directory
of web sites generated automatically by Inktomi,
which also provides its more traditional crawler-based
results. iWon gives away daily, weekly and monthly
prizes in a marketing model unique among the major
services. It launched in Fall 1999. |
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Web
Wombat |
The
Web Wombat network, is one of the largest Australian
based Search Engines and provides more than 1
million search queries per month. |
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WhatUSeek
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The
whatUseek collection provides over 1.3 million
search queries per day and pride themselves on
providing strong results per any search.
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| OEM
SEARCH ENGINES |
Search
engines that play-the-game but are fed results
by someone else’s database. |
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Northern
Light
http://www.northernlight.com |
Northern
Light went online in the fall of 1997. NL currently
has one of the largest databases on the internet
in its directory by using its crawler Gulliver.
This once potential star has never produced users
and is generally ignored by webmasters as a source
of referrals.
Northern Light started in 1995 in the basement
of an old mill building in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
A year and a half later NorthernLight.com went
online in August of 1997 with 30 employees. At
the end of 1998, they had added precision search
enhancements, advanced search forms, a real-time
news, thousands of Special Collection publications,
and millions of Web pages. Today that has nearly
200 employees. |
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Goto.com
http://www.goto.com
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GoTo
was founded by idealab and Bill Gross. Goto was
the first major search engine to succefully auction
search results. It arrived on the net to a very
luke warm if not hostile reception. However, Goto
has earned a strong reputation with webmasters
based upon quality business dealings. Goto has
been rock solid in its customer relations over
the years and made no apologies for selling results.
Goto
uses Inktomi for non-paid search results, but
only lists the first 15 hits. One of the lowest
bandwidth (fast loading) search engines on the
net. Purchased the World Wide Web Worm in early
1998 that was developed by Oliver McBryan in 1994
which was one of the first robot-driven search
engines on the Web, however all scraps of wwww
have been killed. GoTo's value as a legitimate
search engine is marginal, and its validity is
still in question due to the selling of keywords.
Goto is the only major search player to provide
full directions to its home headquarters on its
website (its the little things in life). |
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AOL
NetFind
http://www.aol.com/netfind
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AOL
is now using Inktomi for search results and the
Open Directory project for directory results.
AOL formerly used (1996-1997) a cobranded version
of Excite in North America. While across the pond
in Europe, Aol used a version of Lycos for results.
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| Search.com
http://www.search.com/
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another of Cnet's site. This one has search results
fed by Infoseek. There is also a small set of listings
built by its own inhouse crawling left over from
when search.com first went online. |
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