Search Engines

Search Engines are specialized programs that facilitate the retrieval of data from the Internet, on a business related network or on a personal computer system. They allow users to ask for contents meeting certain criteria usually involving a certain word or phrase, then gives a list of articles that matches those words or phrases. There are number of different engines that can be used for different types of searches and can be narrowed for optimal results.  

Before the 1990¡¦s Search Engines were non existent. The first tool to be used for searching the Internet was Archie, which was created in 1990 by a student named Alan Emtage who attended McGill University in Motreal. Searches were achieved by downloading director listing of files on public FTP (File Transfer Protocol) sites. This created a database of files for searching but could not search by file contents.

The first Web search engine was Wandex that was created by Matthew Gray at MIT in 1993, this no longer in exists. Another earlier search engine Aliweb created in 1933 still exists today. The first full text and widely know search engine was WebCrawler which was introduced 1994. Unlike previous search engines WebCrawler became the standard for all future search engines. It gave its users the option to search for any word on any webpage. Since then numerous search engines have became accessible on the Internet. The most popular with total market share and number of searches for April 2007 were:

Source: Nielsen/NetRatings, 2007
Search Engines # Of Searches April 2007 Market Share April 2007
Google 3,773,032 55.2
Yahoo 1,497,154 21.9
MSN/Windows Live 612,526 9.0
AOL 371,038 5.4
Ask.com 126,286 1.8
My Web Search 67,958 1.0
Comcast 35,239 0.5
Earthlink 30,022 0.4
Dogpile.com 28,556 0.4
My Way 26,814 0.4
Other 269,069 3.9
Total Searches 6,837693 100.00

The majority of search engines are free of charge to their users. However, there are some fee-based search services that are provided... [continues]

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