Development of the major search engines
It is an interesting fact that during the first years of internet history, nobody was interested in search. Nevertheless, the ideas of the major search engines could develop and move outside their first headquarters, which often started out at the university Stanford (Yahoo!, Google)
I will try to give a brief overview of the development of the major search engines in chronological order.
The first search engines
The first search engines were named Archie and Veronica and they only searched the document titles of publications. 1
Altavista
If you ask in any board about search engine optimization, you will find out that they refer to Altavista as the first search engine that really could be used. It was the first search engine that had the possibility to index the full text of a document.
Altavista was an experiment to show the hardware possibilities of DEC, a hardware company which was very important.
From 1994 to 1997, Yahoo! only had its directory without offering an extra search panel, and Altavista, using money from the parent company; DEC, could prosper.
In the year 1997, Altavista was king of search, but then it was turned into a portal and later on sold.
This was, in my opinion, the first time that a great search engine model crashed because it lacked a veritable business model to create income in order to satisfy shareholders. 2
Larry Page and Sergey Brin started with Google as an experiment at Stanford university and first named it BackRub.
The name Google refers to the name “Googol”, which is a name for a 1 followed by 100 zeros.
Google was formally incorporated on the 7. September 1998. 3
Nevertheless, it took Google a very long time until they could get into the zone to make profit, and until they implemented Google AdWords and, later, Google AdSense, Google could hardly gain profit from their search engine.
During the last years, Google became a major player, not only providing search for documents, it now provides search for videos, pictures, newsgroups and many other functions, for example the possibility of local search and Google Maps.
Some of these features have been made possible by purchasing other companies, for example Picasa, a picture service for sorting pictures on your desktop.
The first Google IPO (Initial Public Offering) at the stock market was anticipated, and they went public in September 2004 with 80 $ per share, which increased on more than 400 $ a share at the moment of writing.
MSN Search
Microsoft did not involve into the search business for a very long time. There were rumours about MSN wanting to buy Google or buy an amount of shares, but in the end these rumours died when MSN launched its search engine as a beta test version on the 1. July 2004. 4
Nevertheless, MSN never managed to improve their search engine as far as to be a real competition candidate for Google or other search engines. The amount of visitors that come from MSN Search are very low, even when you are ranking at a #1 position.
Current Statistics
Google is the current leader concerning the amount of users relying on Google in order to find information, but the percentage differs between the countries.
For example, Google is leading in Germany with about 50 - 60 % of the market share; whereas in Spain the MSN portal gets more users. 5
There are also other data available, which solely focus on the amount of search traffic in the U.S.A.
Search Engine Dec-04 Search Share Dec-05 Search Share Change in Percentage Points
Google Search 43.1% 48.8% 5.7
Yahoo! Search 21.7% 21.4% -0.3
MSN Search 14.0% 10.9% -3.1
Source: Nielsen//NetRatings MegaView Search, February 2006
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[1] Wikipedia, Archie-search-engine, available http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archie_search_engine
(15. Feb. 2006)
[2] John Batelle: The Search
[3] Ibid., 86
[4] refer MSN Suche Beta Testing
http://www.abakus-internet-marketing.de/foren/viewtopic/t-6011.html (15.Feb 2006)
[5] refer Statistiken Suchmaschinenanteile
http://www.explido-webmarketing.de/studien_suchmaschinenanteile.htm (15.Feb 2006)