Curiosity and desire to learn.
People adored how knowledge lightens the darkness. Sometimes, it is the secret source of power and sometimes a curse. It started in the Old Ages in Assyria, the world’s oldest known library, founded in the 7th century B.C.
Thousands of years later, the dream of ruling knowledge and access to information became straightforward via the digital revolution, in other words, search engines.
Now they have become an integral part of our lives, often without us realizing. They are complex software systems that have evolved significantly since their inception.
Historical Development
The journey of search engines began in 1990 with the creation of the Archie search engine. This was a pre-web content search engine created by Alan Emtage, a computer science student at McGill University. Archie would download the directory listings of all files located on public anonymous FTP sites, creating a searchable database of file names.
In 1991, the rise of Gopher led to two new search programs, Veronica and Jughead. These programs searched the file names and titles stored in Gopher index systems. Veronica(Very Easy, Rodent-Oriented, Net-wide Index to Computerized Archives) provided a keyword search of most Gopher menu titles in the entire Gopher listings, while Jughead(Jonzy’s Universal Gopher Hierarchy Excavation And Display) was a tool for obtaining menu information from specific Gopher servers.
In 1993, Matthew K. Gray produced the first known web robot, the Perl-based World Wide Web Wanderer, and used it to generate an index of the web called the Wandex. However, this was intended only to measure the size of the web rather than to facilitate search.
The first web search engine, W3Catalog, was released to the world on September 2, 1993. It was written by Oscar Nierstrasz at the University of Geneva.
There were some attempts to build various search engines, however, in 1998, Google started to operate and dominated the market in 4 years.
Future Projections
The future of search engines is expected to be dominated by integration across all devices and the Internet of Things. Search engines are already well on their way to being omnipresent, and this is only set to continue growing, increasing in personalization and leveraging every ounce of data they can obtain.
Google recently secured a patent for a new ambitious feature for their search engine known as ‘Methods, systems, and media for presenting content organized by category’. The patent reveals Google’s ambitious growth plans for the near future. The buzzwords around this technology are ‘queryless searches’, i.e., giving their search engine the power to give users results they’re looking for without the need for them to provide any search queries.
While it’s difficult to predict precisely what will happen in the next 20 years, it’s likely that the definition and functionality of search engines will evolve significantly. This makes it crucial for businesses to adjust their strategies accordingly.
Also, AI integration into web browsers is a big step in technology. As the internet gives the majority of unrelated or wrong info from time to time, artificial minds seem to solve the issue fast and effectively. Let`s see what future will bring us.
It will be interesting to see how this field continues to evolve in the coming years. I hope you enjoyed the reading.
Have a nice day😊