# Timeline of web search engines

This page provides a full timeline of web search engines, starting from the WHOis in 1982, the Archie search engine in 1990, and subsequent developments in the field. It is complementary to the history of web search engines page that provides more qualitative detail on the history.

## Timeline

| Year | Month | Day | Event type | Event |
| 1982 | | | Pre-web domain search engine | WHOis Elizabeth Feinler and her team (who had created the Resource Directory for ARPANET) were responsible for creating the first WHOIS directory in the early 1970s. Feinler set up a server in Stanford's Network Information Center (NIC) which acted as a directory that could retrieve relevant information about people or entities. She and the team created domains, with Feinler's suggestion that domains be divided into categories based on the physical address of the computer. |
| 1990 | September | 10 (released) | Pre-web content search engine | The Archie search engine, created by Alan Emtage computer science student at McGill University in Montreal, goes live. The program downloads the directory listings of all the files located on public anonymous FTP (File Transfer Protocol) sites, creates a searchable database of a lot of file names; however, Archie does not index the contents of these sites since the amount of data is so limited it can be readily searched manually. |
| 1991 | | | Pre-web search engine | The rise of Gopher (created in 1991 by Mark McCahill at the University of Minnesota) leads to two new search programs, Veronica and Jughead. Like Archie, they search the file names and titles stored in Gopher index systems. Veronica (Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index to Computerized Archives) provides a keyword search of most Gopher menu titles in the entire Gopher listings. Jughead (Jonzy's Universal Gopher Hierarchy Excavation And Display) is 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. |
| 1992 | | | Virtual library of the web | Tim Berners-Lee sets up the Virtual Library (VLib), a loose confederation of topical experts maintaining relevant topical link lists. |
| 1993 | June | | First web robot | Matthew K. Gray produces the first known web robot, the Perl-based World Wide Web Wanderer, and uses it to generate an index of the web called the Wandex. However, the World Wide Web Wanderer is intended only to measure the size of the web rather than to facilitate search. |
| 1993 | September | 2 | First web search engine | W3Catalog, written by Oscar Nierstrasz at the University of Geneva, is released to the world. It is the world's first web search engine. It does not rely on a crawler and indexer but rather on already existing high-quality lists of websites. One of its main drawbacks is that the bot accesses each page hundreds of times each day, causing performance degradation. |
| 1993 | October/November | | Second web search engine | Aliweb, a web search engine created by Martijn Koster, is announced. It does not use a web robot, but instead depends on being notified by website administrators of the existence at each site of an index file in a particular format. The absence of a bot means that less bandwidth is used; however, most website administrators are not aware of the need to submit their data. |
| 1993 | December | | First web search engine to use a crawler and indexer | JumpStation, created by Jonathon Fletcher, is released. It is the first WWW resource-discovery tool to combine the three essential features of a web search engine (crawling, indexing, and searching). |
| 1994 | January | | New web directory | Yahoo!, founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo, launches Yahoo! Directory. It becomes the first popular Web directory. |
| 1994 | January | | New web search engine | Infoseek is launched. |
| 1994 | March | | New web search engine | The World-Wide Web Worm is released. It is claimed to have been created in September 1993, at which time there did not exist any crawler-based search engine, but it is not the earliest at the time of its actual release. It supports Perl-based regular expressions. |
| 1994 | April | 20 | New web search engine | The WebCrawler search engine, created by Brian Pinkerton at the University of Washington, is released. Unlike its predecessors, it allows users to search for any word in any webpage, which has become the standard for all major search engines since. |
| 1994 | July | | New web search engine | Lycos, a web search engine, is released. It began as a research project by Michael Loren Mauldin of Carnegie Mellon University's main Pittsburgh campus. |
| 1995 | | | New search engine | Yahoo! Search is launched. It is a search function that allows users to search Yahoo! Directory. It becomes the first popular search engine on the Web. However, it is not a true Web crawler search engine. |
| 1995 | | | New search engine | Search.ch is launched. It is a search engine and web portal for Switzerland. |
| 1995 | | | New web directory | LookSmart is released. It competes with Yahoo! as a web directory, and the competition makes both directories more inclusive. |
| 1995 | December | | Web search engine supporting natural language queries | Altavista is launched. This is a first among web search engines in many ways: it has unlimited bandwidth, allows natural language queries, has search tips, and allows people to add or delete their domains in 24 hours. |
| 1996 | | | New web search engine | Robin Li developed the RankDex site-scoring algorithm for search engines results page ranking and received a US patent for the technology. It was the first search engine that used hyperlinks to measure the quality of websites it was indexing, predating the very similar algorithm patent filed by Google two years later in 1998. Larry Page referenced Li's work as a citation in some of his U.S. patents for PageRank. Li later used his Rankdex technology for the Baidu search engine. |
| 1996 | January–March | | New web search engine | Larry Page and Sergey Brin begin working on BackRub, the predecessor to Google Search. The crawler begins activity in March. |
| 1996 | May | | New web search engine | Inktomi releases its HotBot search engine. |
| 1996 | October | | New web search engine | Gary Culliss and Steven Yang begin work at MIT on the popularity engine, a version of the Direct Hit Technologies search engine that ranks results across users according to the selections made during previous searches. |
| 1997 | April | | New natural language-based web search engine | Ask Jeeves, a natural language web search engine, that aims to rank links by popularity, is released. It would later become Ask.com. |
| 1997 | September | 15 | New web search engine | The domain Google.com is registered. Soon, Google Search is available to the public from this domain (around 1998). |
| 1997 | September | 23 | New web search engine (non-English) | Arkady Volozh and Ilya Segalovich launch their Russian web search engine Yandex and publicly present it at the Softool exhibition in Moscow. The initial development is by Comptek; Yandex would become a separate company in 2000. |
| 1998 | June | 5 | New web directory | Gnuhoo, a web directory project by Rich Skrenta and Bob Truel, both employees of Sun Microsystems, launches. It would later be renamed the Open Directory Project. |
| 1998 | July–September | | New web search portal | MSN launches a search portal called MSN Search, using search results from Inktomi. After many changes to the backend search engine, MSN would start developing in-house search technology in 2005, and later change its name to Bing in June 2009. |
| 1998 | August | | New web search engine | Direct Hit Technologies releases their popularity search engine in partnership with HotBot, providing more relevant results based on prior user search activity. |
| 1999 | May | | New web search engine | AlltheWeb, based on the Ph.D. thesis of Tor Egge at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, titled FTP Search, launches. The engine is launched by Egge's company Fast Search & Transfer, established on July 16, 1997. |
| 2000 | January | 1 | New web search portal | Baidu, a Chinese company that would grow to provide many search-related services, launches. It was founded by Robin Li, who previously developed RankDex in 1996. |
| 2002–03 | | | Web search business consolidation | Yahoo! buys Inktomi (2002) and then Overture Services Inc. (2003) which has already bought AlltheWeb and Altavista. Starting 2003, Yahoo! starts using its own Yahoo Slurp web crawler to power Yahoo! Search. Yahoo! Search combines the technologies of all Yahoo!'s acquisitions (until 2002, Yahoo! had been using Google to power its search). |
| 2004–05 | November (2004) – February (2005) | | Change in backend providers | Microsoft starts using its own indexer and crawler for MSN Search rather than using blended results from LookSmart and Inktomi. |
| 2004 | December | | User experience | Google Suggest is introduced as a Google Labs feature. |
| 2005 | January | | Webmaster tools | To combat link spam, Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft collectively introduce the nofollow attribute. |
| 2005 | October | | New web search engine | Overture Services Inc. owner Bill Gross launches the Snap search engine, with many features such as display of search volumes and other information, as well as sophisticated auto-completion and related terms display. It is unable to get traction and soon goes out of business. |
| 2006 | December | 23 (proposed) | New human-curated web search engine | Wikia Search (Wikia), a search engine based on human curation. |
| 2007 | January | 31 (re-proposed) | New human-curated web search engine | Wikia Search |
| 2008 | January | 28 | New web search engine | Cuil, a web search engine created by ex-Googlers that uses picture thumbnails to display search results, launches. It would later shut down on September 17, 2010. |
| 2008 | September | 25 | New web search engine | DuckDuckGo (DDG), a web search engine focused on protecting searchers' privacy by not profiling its users, launches. |
| 2009 | March–May | 14 | Web search EOL | shutdown of Wikia Search |
| 2009 | July | 29 | Web search engine consolidation | Microsoft and Yahoo! announce that they have made a ten-year deal in which the Yahoo! search engine would be replaced by Bing. Yahoo! will get to keep 88% of the revenue from all search ad sales on its site for the first five years of the deal, and have the right to sell adverts on some Microsoft sites. Yahoo! Search will still maintain its own user interface, but will eventually feature "Powered by Bing™" branding. |
| 2009 | August | 10 (announced) | Search algorithm update | Named Caffeine, it promises faster crawling, expansion of the index, and a near-real-time integration of indexing and ranking. |
| 2009 | September | 1 | New web search engine | The search engine ImHalal is launched built on top of social-cultural Islamic values. |
| 2009 | December | 7 | New web search engine | The search engine Ecosia is launched. |
| 2010 | June | 8 | Search algorithm update | Caffeine rollout completed and made live |
| 2010 | September | 8 | User experience | Google launches Google Instant, described as a search-before-you-type feature: as users are typing, Google predicts the user's whole search query (using the same technology as in Google Suggest, later called the autocomplete feature) and instantaneously shows results for the top prediction. Google claims that this is estimated to save 2–5 seconds per search query. SEO commentators initially believe that this will have a major effect on search engine optimization, but soon revise downward their estimate of the impact. |
| 2010 | November | 1 | New web search engine | Blekko, a search engine that uses slashtags to allow people to search in more targeted categories, launches. |
| 2011 | February | 23–24 | Search algorithm update | Google launches Google Panda, a major update affecting 12% of search queries. The update continues with the earlier work of cracking down on spam, content farms, scrapers, and websites with a high ad-to-content ratio. The rollout is gradual over several months, and Panda will see many further updates. |
| 2011 | June | 2 | Webmaster tools | Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft announce Schema.org, a joint initiative that supports a richer range of tags that websites can use to convey better information. |
| 2012 | January | 10 | Search algorithm update, user experience | Google launches Search Plus Your World, a deep integration of one's social data into search. SEO commentators are critical of how the search results favor Google+ and push it to users, compared to more widely used social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. |
| 2012 | April | 24 | Search algorithm update | Google launches its "Webspam update" which would soon become known as Google Penguin. |
| 2012 | May | 10 | User experience | Microsoft announces a redesign of its Bing search engine that includes "Sidebar", a social feature that searches users' social networks for information relevant to the search query. |
| 2012 | May | 16 | Search algorithm update | Google starts rolling out Knowledge Graph, used by Google internally to store semantic relationships between objects. Google now begins displaying supplemental information about objects related to search queries on the side. |
| 2013 | April | 13 | New web search engine | Pipilika, first Bangla search engine, launched. |
| 2013 | July | 4 | New web search engine | French search engine Qwant launched and operated from Paris. It claims that it does not employ user tracking or personalize search results in order to avoid trapping users in a filter bubble. The search engine is available in 26 languages. |
| 2013 | September | 26 | Search algorithm update | Google releases Google Hummingbird, a core algorithm update that may enable a more semantic search and more effective use of the Knowledge Graph in the future. |
| 2014 | January | 22 | New web search engine | Searx, a free and open-source metasearch engine, is launched. Searx puts an emphasis on privacy. |
| 2014 | July | 24 | Search algorithm update | Google introduces Google Pigeon, with the goal of increasing the ranking of local listings in a search. |
| 2021 | June | 21 | New web search engine | Brave Software, Inc., the developer of the Brave web browser, launches their own search engine, called Brave Search. |
| 2024 | July | 26 | New web search engine | OpenAI launches SearchGPT, a prototype search engine that combines traditional search engine features with generative AI capabilities. SearchGPT's architecture is built on the principles of transformer models, which use self- attention mechanisms to process and generate text. |