Search Engine Industry
History of search engine
The need for search services grew with the expanding reach and magnitude of the World Wide Web. One of the earliest search services, Yahoo!, was a directory of sites selected and organized into categories by human editors. The Web soon grew too large for directory-based search. AltaVista invented technology that automated search, relying on software “spiders” that created a searchable index of page contents and on algorithms that ranked page relevance based on the frequency of keyword references. Yahoo! added AltaVista’s algorithmic search engine, but in 1998 replaced AltaVista with Inktomi, which used parallel-processing networks to offer faster processing and a larger index.
As website developers exploited search algorithms by repeating keywords on their pages, searches increasingly returned irrelevant listings—”spam”—that frustrated users. In 1998, Sergey Brin and Larry Page tackled this problem as graduate students at Stanford. Their PageRank algorithm reliably delivered more relevant searches by favoring pages that were referenced—”linked to”—by other pages. These links were called “votes,” because they signaled that another page’s webmaster had decided that the focal page deserved attention. The focal page’s importance was determined by counting the number of votes it received, weighting votes more heavily when they were cast by pages that Google had previously deemed to be important. This approach required PageRank to solve an equation with 500 million variables and 3 billion terms.
In June 1999, Brin and Page announced first-round funding for their start-up, Google, from two elite venture capital firms: Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins. In June 2000, Google’s index of 1 billion web pages surpassed those of its rivals and Google replaced Inktomi as Yahoo!’s search engine. At the time, Google was focused solely on