This page provides a full timeline of web search engines, starting from the WHOis in 1982, the Archie search engine in 1990, and subsequent developments in the field. It is complementary to the history of web search engines page that provides more qualitative detail on the history.
Timeline Year Month Day Event type Event 1982 Pre-web domain search engine WHOis Elizabeth Feinler and her team (who had created the Resource Directory for ARPANET) were responsible for creating the first WHOIS directory in the early 1970s. Feinler set up a server in Stanford's Network Information Center (NIC) which acted as a directory that could retrieve relevant information about people or entities. She and the team created domains, with Feinler's suggestion that domains be divided into categories based on the physical address of the computer. 1990 September 10 (released) Pre-web content search engine The Archie search engine, created by Alan Emtage computer science student at McGill University in Montreal, goes live. The program downloads the directory listings of all the files located on public anonymous FTP (File Transfer Protocol) sites, creates a searchable database of a lot of file names; however, Archie does not index the contents of these sites since the amount of data is so limited it can be readily searched manually. 1991 Pre-web search engine The rise of Gopher (created in 1991 by Mark McCahill at the University of Minnesota) leads to two new search programs, Veronica and Jughead. Like Archie, they search the file names and titles stored in Gopher index systems. Veronica (Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index to Computerized Archives) provides a keyword search of most Gopher menu titles in the entire Gopher listings. Jughead (Jonzy's Universal Gopher Hierarchy Excavation And Display) is a tool for obtaining menu information from specific Gopher servers. While the name of the search engine "Archie" was not a reference to the Archie comic book series, "Veronica" and "Jughead" are characters in the series, thus referencing their predecessor. 1992 Virtual library of the web Tim Berners-Lee sets up the Virtual Library (VLib), a loose confederation of topical experts maintaining relevant topical link lists.1993June First web robot Matthew K. Gray produces the first known web robot, the Perl-based World Wide Web Wanderer, and uses it to generate an index of the web called the Wandex. However, the World Wide Web Wanderer is intended only to measure the size of the web rather than to facilitate search.September 2 First web search engine W3Catalog, written by Oscar Nierstrasz at the University of Geneva, is released to the world. It is the world's first web search engine. It does not rely on a crawler and indexer but rather on already existing high-quality lists of websites. One of its main drawbacks is that the bot accesses each page hundreds of times each day, causing performance degradation.October/November Second web search engine Aliweb, a web search engine created by Martijn Koster, is announced. It does not use a web robot, but instead depends on being notified by website administrators of the existence at each site of an index file in a particular format. The absence of a bot means that less bandwidth is used; however, most website administrators are not aware of the need to submit their data.December First web search engine to use a crawler and indexer JumpStation, created by Jonathon Fletcher, is released. It is the first WWW resource-discovery tool to combine the three essential features of a web search engine (crawling, indexing, and searching).1994 JanuaryNew web directory Yahoo!, founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo, launches Yahoo! Directory. It becomes the first popular Web directory.New web search engine Infoseek is launched.March New web search engine The World-Wide Web Worm is released. It is claimed to have been created in September 1993, at which time there did not exist any crawler-based search engine, but it is not the earliest at the time of its actual release. It supports Perl-based regular expressions.April 20 New web search engine The WebCrawler search engine, created by Brian Pinkerton at the University of Washington, is released. Unlike its predecessors, it allows users to search for any word in any webpage, which has become the standard for all major search engines since.July New web search engine Lycos, a web search engine, is released. It began as a research project by Michael Loren Mauldin of Carnegie Mellon University's main Pittsburgh campus.1995 New search engine Yahoo! Search is launched. It is a search function that allows users to search Yahoo! Directory. It becomes the first popular search engine on the Web. However, it is not a true Web crawler search engine. New search engine Search.ch is launched. It is a search engine and web portal for Switzerland. New web directory LookSmart is released. It competes with Yahoo! as a web directory, and the competition makes both directories more inclusive.December Web search engine supporting natural language queries Altavista is launched. This is a first among web search engines in many ways: it has unlimited bandwidth, allows natural language queries, has search tips, and allows people to add or delete their domains in 24 hours. 1996 New web search engine Robin Li developed the RankDex site-scoring algorithm for search engines results page rankingGreenberg, Andy, "The Man Who's Beating Google", Forbes magazine, October 5, 2009Yanhong Li, "Toward a Qualitative Search Engine," IEEE Internet Computing, vol. 2, no. 4, pp. 24–29, July/Aug. 1998, "About: RankDex", rankdex.com and received a US patent for the technology.USPTO,