what is search engine?

A search engine is a sort of a page that shows the list of all the web sites along with the information on it. This service had been every popularly used among people and at time the search engine is also not able to provide people with effective results. It had been found out that the search engine is of greater benefit to the people and majority of the people had been utilizing it as a source of getting quality information.

For the search engine activity it is highly recommended that the person had to enter the keywords in the search box which as a results provides the person with a list of all the documents and pages which are relevant to the keyword that had been searched. 

It must be made sure that the entire data on the search engine can be accessed by the people when they enter a particular keyword for certain results. When the results are easily accessed on the search engine, the serach engine with positive views and points is ranked on the top most positions.  Google, LycosAsk, yahoo, Jeeves, Look Smart, Alta Vista, are the most widely used search engines where people can get a larger range of information. The entire information gathers from all the search engines is quite helpful and hence many benefits can also be generated through it. Through search engine people can get their products marketed easily and at time on the search engine, people make money too. The money is earned each time the person clicks the specific website. Mostly through search engines, the internet marketing activity is being carried out. The main aim for the creation of the search engines is the customer need.

Mainly the search engine companies are always aware of their customer needs so they try to place certain important information on the beginning information but at time the most important information from the company view point is not at all effective and useful for the people.

History

During the early development of the web, there was a list of webservers edited by Tim Berners-Lee and hosted on the CERN webserver. One historical snapshot from 1992 remains.^[1] As more webservers went online the central list could not keep up. On the NCSA site new servers were announced under the title "What's New!"^[2]

The very first tool used for searching on the Internet was Archie.^[3] The name stands for "archive" without the "v". It was created in 1990 by Alan Emtage, Bill Heelan and J. Peter Deutsch, computer science students at McGill University in Montreal. The program downloaded the directory listings of all the files located on public anonymous FTP (File Transfer Protocol) sites, creating a searchable database of file names; however, Archie did not index the contents of these sites since the amount of data was so limited it could be readily searched manually.

The rise of Gopher (created in 1991 by Mark McCahill at the University of Minnesota) led to two new search programs, Veronica and Jughead. Like Archie, they searched the file names and titles stored in Gopher index systems. Veronica (Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index toComputerized Archives) provided a keyword search of most Gopher menu titles in the entire Gopher listings. Jughead (Jonzy's Universal GopherHierarchy Excavation And Display) was 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.

In the summer of 1993, no search engine existed yet for the web, though numerous specialized catalogues were maintained by hand. Oscar Nierstrasz at the University of Geneva wrote a series of Perl scripts that would periodically mirror these pages and rewrite them into a standard format which formed the basis for W3Catalog, the web's first primitive search engine, released on September 2, 1993.^[4]

In June 1993, Matthew Gray, then at MIT, produced what was probably the first web robot, the Perl-based World Wide Web Wanderer, and used it to generate an index called 'Wandex'. The purpose of the Wanderer was to measure the size of the World Wide Web, which it did until late 1995. The web's second search engine Aliweb appeared in November 1993. Aliweb did not use a web robot, but instead depended on being notified by website administrators of the existence at each site of an index file in a particular format.

JumpStation (released in December 1993^[5]) used a web robot to find web pages and to build its index, and used a web form as the interface to its query program. It was thus the first WWW resource-discovery tool to combine the three essential features of a web search engine (crawling, indexing, and searching) as described below. Because of the limited resources available on the platform on which it ran, its indexing and hence searching were limited to the titles and headings found in the web pages the crawler encountered.

One of the first "full text" crawler-based search engines was WebCrawler, which came out in 1994. Unlike its predecessors, it let users search for any word in any webpage, which has become the standard for all major search engines since. It was also the first one to be widely known by the public. Also in 1994, Lycos (which started at Carnegie Mellon University) was launched and became a major commercial endeavor.

Soon after, many search engines appeared and vied for popularity. These included Magellan, Excite, Infoseek, Inktomi, Northern Light, andAltaVista. Yahoo! was among the most popular ways for people to find web pages of interest, but its search function operated on its web directory, rather than full-text copies of web pages. Information seekers could also browse the directory instead of doing a keyword-based search.

In 1996, Netscape was looking to give a single search engine an exclusive deal to be the featured search engine on Netscape's web browser. There was so much interest that instead a deal was struck with Netscape by five of the major search engines, where for $5 million per year each search engine would be in rotation on the Netscape search engine page. The five engines were Yahoo!, Magellan, Lycos, Infoseek, and Excite.^[6][7]

Search engines were also known as some of the brightest stars in the Internet investing frenzy that occurred in the late 1990s.^[8] Several companies entered the market spectacularly, receiving record gains during their initial public offerings. Some have taken down their public search engine, and are marketing enterprise-only editions, such as Northern Light. Many search engine companies were caught up in the dot-com bubble, a speculation-driven market boom that peaked in 1999 and ended in 2001.

Around 2000, Google's search engine rose to prominence.^{[citation needed]} The company achieved better results for many searches with an innovation called PageRank. This iterative algorithm ranks web pages based on the number and PageRank of other web sites and pages that link there, on the premise that good or desirable pages are linked to more than others. Google also maintained a minimalist interface to its search engine. In contrast, many of its competitors embedded a search engine in a web portal.

By 2000, Yahoo! was providing search services based on Inktomi's search engine. Yahoo! acquired Inktomi in 2002, and Overture (which ownedAlltheWeb and AltaVista) in 2003. Yahoo! switched to Google's search engine until 2004, when it launched its own search engine based on the combined technologies of its acquisitions.

Microsoft first launched MSN Search in the fall of 1998 using search results from Inktomi. In early 1999 the site began to display listings fromLooksmart blended with results from Inktomi except for a short time in 1999 when results from AltaVista were used instead. In 2004, Microsoftbegan a transition to its own search technology, powered by its own web crawler (called msnbot).

Microsoft's rebranded search engine, Bing, was launched on June 1, 2009. On July 29, 2009, Yahoo! and Microsoft finalized a deal in whichYahoo! Search would be powered by Microsoft Bing technology.

Web Browser History

Dozens of innovative web browsers have been created by various people and teams over the years.

The first widely used web browser was NCSA Mosaic. The Mosaic programming team then created the first commercial web browser called Netscape Navigator, later renamed Communicator, then renamed back to just Netscape. The Netscape browser led in user share until Microsoft Internet Explorer took the lead in 1999 due to its distribution advantage. A free open source software  version of Netscape was then developed called Mozilla, which was the internal name for the old Netscape browser, and released in 2002. Mozilla has since gained in market share, particularly on non-Windows platforms, largely due to its open source foundation, and in 2004 was released in the quickly popular FireFox version.

A chronological listing of some of the influential early web browsers that advanced the state of the art is provided below:

• WorldWideWeb. Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first web browser on a NeXT computer, called WorldWideWeb, finishing the first version on Christmas day, 1990. He released the program to a number of people at CERN in March, 1991, introducing the web to the high energy physics community, and beginning its spread.

• libwww. Berners-Lee and a student at CERN named Jean-Francois Groff ported the WorldWideWeb application from the NeXT environment to the more common C language in 1991 and 1992, calling the new browser libwww. Groff later started the first web design company, InfoDesign.ch.

• Line-mode. Nicola Pellow, a math student interning at CERN, wrote a line-mode web browser that would work on any device, even a teletype. In 1991, Nicola and the team ported the browser to a range of computers, from Unix to Microsoft DOS, so that anyone could access the web, at that point consisting primarily of the CERN phone book.

• Erwise. After a visit from Robert Cailliau, a group of students at Helsinki University of Technology joined together to write a web browser as a master's project. Since the acronym for their department was called "OTH", they called the browser "erwise", as a joke on the word "otherwise". The final version was released in April, 1992, and included several advanced features, but wasn't developed further after the students graduated and went on to other jobs.

• ViolaWWW. Pei Wei, a student at the University of California at Berkeley, released the second browser for Unix, called ViolaWWW, in May, 1992. This browser was built on the powerful interpretive language called Viola that Wei had developed for Unix computers. ViolaWWW had a range of advanced features, including the ability to display graphics and download applets.

• Midas. During the summer of 1992, Tony Johnson at SLACdeveloped a third browser for Unix systems, called Midas, to help distribute information to colleagues about his physics research.

• Samba. Robert Cailliau started development of the first web browser for the Macintosh, called Samba. Development was picked up by Nicola Pellow, and the browser was functional by the end of 1992.

• Mosaic. Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina from the NCSA released the first version of Mosaic for X-Windows on Unix computers in February, 1993. A version for the Macintosh was developed by Aleks Totic and released a few months later, making Mosaic the first browser with cross-platform support. Mosaic introduced support for sound, video clips, forms support, bookmarks, and history files, and quickly became the most popular non-commercial web browser. In August, 1994, NCSA assigned commercial rights to Mosaic to Spyglass, Inc., which subsequently licensed the technology to several other companies, including Microsoft for use in Internet Explorer. The NCSA stopped developing Mosaic in January 1997.

• Arena. In 1993, Dave Raggett at Hewlett-Packard in Bristol, England, developed a browser called Arena, with powerful features for positioning tables and graphics.

• Lynx. The University of Kansas had written a hypertext browser independently of the web, called Lynx, used to distribute campus information. A student named Lou Montulli added an Internet interface to the program, and released the web browser Lynx 2.0 in March, 1993. Lynx quickly became the preferred web browser for character mode terminals without graphics, and remains in use today. Resources include the Browser.org Lynx  page, the ISC Lynx  page, and the Lynx User Guide .

• Cello . Tom Bruce, cofounder of the Legal Information Institute , realized that most lawyers used Microsoft PC's, and so he developed a web browser for that platform called Cello, finished in the summer of 1993.

• Opera. In 1994, the Opera browser was developed by a team of researchers at a telecommunication company called Telenor in Oslo, Norway. The following year, two members of the team -- Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner and Geir Ivarsøy -- left Telenor to establish Opera Software to develop the browser commercially. Opera 2.1 was first made available on the Internet in the summer of 1996.

• Internet in a box. In January, 1994, O'Reilly and Associates announced a product called Internet In A Box which collected all of the software needed to access the web together, so that you only had to install one application, instead of downloading and installing several programs. While not a unique browser in its own right, this product was a breakthrough because it distributed other browsers and made the web a lot more accessible to the home user.

• Navipress. In February, 1994, Navisoft released a browser for the PC and Macintosh called Navipress. This was the first browser since Berners-Lee's WorldWideWeb browser that incorporated an editor, so that you could browse and edit content at the same time. Navipress later became AOLPress , and is still available in some download locations on the Internet but has not been maintained since 1997.

• Mozilla. In October, 1994, Netscape released the the first beta version of their browser, Mozilla 0.96b, over the Internet. On December 15, the final version was released, Mozilla 1.0, making it the first commercial web browser. An open source version of the Netscape browser was released in 2002 was also named Mozilla in tribute to this early version, and then released as the quickly popular FireFox in November, 2004.
•  Internet Explorer. On August 23rd, 1995, Microsoft released their Windows 95 operating system, including a Web browser called Internet Explorer. By the fall of 1996, Explorer had a third of market share, and passed Netscape to became the leading web browser in 1999.