Internet Search - The development

• Although Web browsers had been invented and were being actively used, it was not the same as we see now with Google or even Yahoo and Bing, finding anything on the internet was an arduous task, with pages upon pages of plain text with no clear direction. One had to look around various pages to finally get to what they were looking for.


• The foundation for the modern-day search engine was laid by Jerry Yang and David Filo, they were trying to find a way to use the internet to win a fantasy basketball contest, they scoured the web, site by site, looking for up-to-date sports information but this was turning to be difficult, they then realized they needed some kind of directory that would guide users to their desired path. Jerry and David's guide to the World Wide Web was the first thing of its kind. This guide was later named Yahoo! and went on to become the first search engine.


• After its launch, millions of users from around the globe have flocked to the site. Yahoo was the first to include ads and also one of the firsts to start making any kind of money using the internet, nobody before Yahoo had made any money from the internet. As time went by, the number of yahoo users kept increasing which resulted in their ad revenues increasing. Yahoo became a tech giant then.


• Yahoo's biggest rival came by 1996, a company called EXCITE, they operated on a similar search model but slightly different to Yahoo, Excite was pure software, and instead of having a list of sites sorted and compiled into categories by human hands, excite would take the keyword one entered and crawl the web, returning the sites with that keyword. Excite was more sophisticated than Yahoo. It was that is a rudimentary version of what we think of as search today.


• By 1997, the internet was exploding as millions of people flocked online to see what all the excitement was about. Companies like Yahoo excite and the other search engines were busy turning themselves into what was known as portals. One-Stop destinations jam-packed with diversions. From stock tickers to email to chat rooms. They were online carnivals filled with an array of glittery enticements, and trinkets and baubles designed to turn users into a captive audience for the benefit of advertisers. All this focus on flashy tricks led to no improvement of the search functionality, where if you searched a keyword it would mostly return ads with no relevant information.


• Then came Google, started by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Google interpreted a link from page A to page B as a vote by page A for page B. Google assessed a page’s importance by the votes it receives and quotes. In other words, when a site about say Abraham Lincoln has been linked to 15 million times, that means that a lot of people have found it useful. In order to find the most irrelevant sites, what you had to do was count the links. Google then came up with a way to keep their search authentic and simultaneously gather revenue. They would give you the organic search results and in the header, one would have the Advertisements clearly marked in Blue.