Wandex or Nine things you didn't know about search engines

Figure: the Big three. Or...?

We believe the search engines something taken for granted. They exist because it must exist. Without them we find the necessary and adequate information among millions of web pages would be almost an impossible task.

Here are nine, most likely, unknown to you facts about the search engines.

1. Invented in 1936?

The idea which led eventually to the invention of hypertext, and the argument about the need to develop rapid extract data from the thus stored information (the equivalent of today's search engines) was published in 1945, the American engineer and science administrator Vannevar Bush (Vannevar Bush). His essay "As we might think" it was perhaps written in 1936. It introduced the concept of device memory extender contained original ideas that, eventually, morphed into the Internet.

2. Magic automatic extractor of text

The first real search engine was created in the 1960s by Gerard Salton (Gerard Salton). He and his group at Cornell University has developed a "Witty retrieval system information" (SMART information retrieval system). SMART is an acronym for Salton''s Magic Automatic Retriever of Text, that is the "Magic extractor automatic text Selton". Gerard Salton is considered the father of modern search technology.

3. The first in Internet

The first search engine on the Internet called Archie. It was designed to index FTP archives. The name Archie is just Archive without the letter “v”.

4. The first web search

The first search system for web sites called Wandex :):):) (a smile from the interpreter). It was released in 1993 and used an index created by the first web crawler World Wide Web Wanderer, which was written in Perl by Matthew gray (Matthew Gray) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Now Matthew gray works in Google.

5. Which was nothing much to do

In December 1993, the Internet had 623 website, so the first search engines were smaller than today, more than 162 million web sites.

6. The first full-text search

The first search engine that indexed entire pages, was WebCrawler. Launched in 1994, WebCrawler was the first system that offered full text search like today's search engines. Before search engines index only page titles and meta tags. Today WebCrawler became metapoiskovaya system that integrates information from Google, Yahoo, Live and other search engines.

7. Protocol

Larry page and Sergey Brin began work on the technology, subsequently turned to Google, in 1996. The original name of the project BackRub.

8. Yahoo and Microsoft's belated entry into the game

Yahoo and Microsoft had their own search technology until 2004. Yahoo Search used data from AltaVista and Inktomi, and even some time — Google. MSN Search (now Live Search) took a similar path, though not resorted to the services of Google. Own search technology Microsoft has launched only in 2005 (beta version appeared in 2004).

9. The big three — not exactly what you thought

Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft search are usually called the big three, but this is incorrect, in any case, if you rely on the total number of search queries worldwide. Chinese search engine Baidu ahead of Microsoft Live Search by number of search queries... Thus, the big three are Google, Yahoo, and Baidu.

Article based on information from habrahabr.ru