tim’s blog

Around 2000 Google rose to prominence. Google received better results for many searches with the use of an innovation called page rank. This ranked pages on the number and page rank of other web sites and pages that link to them, on the thought that good and desirable pages are linked to more then others. Google also maintained a minimal interface to its search engine. Most of the competitors embedded the search engine in a web portal

In 1994 Lycos, started at Carnegie Mellon University, was launched and became a commercial venture. Soon after lots of other search engines appeared and vied for popularity in the market. Some of them are Magellan, Excite, Alta Vista and Yahoo. Yahoo was one of the most popular ways for people to find pages of interest, but its search function operated on its web directory rather than full text web page copies. This allowed information seekers to browse the directory rather then doing a key-word based search.

Some of the more popular sites came along together and more created in the following years such as Aliweb launched in 1993.  Others followed such as WebCrawler and Infoseek in 1994, Magellan 1995, and Dogpile and Ask Jeeves  in 1996.  Google came along in 1998 and Yahoo! Search in 2004, Ask.com was launched in both 2005and 2006 and these are just to name a few. 

There were quickly other search site created, after Archie, such as Gopher in 1991 by  Mark McCahill at the University of Minnesota.  Gopher led to two new search programs, Veronica and Jughead.  They searched the names and titles saved in the Gopher index like Archie.  Veronica (Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index Archives) gave keyword searches  for most Gopher menu titles on the entire index.  Jughead  (Jonzy’s Universal Gopher Hierarchy Excavation And Display) was a tool for obtaining menu information from specific Gopher servers.  Archie was not a reference to the Archie comic book series, Veronica and Jughead are characters in the series and thus are referenced to their predecessor. 

A search engine is a way of searching for information on the World Wide Web.  Information may consist of web pages or images or other kind of data.  Some search engines also dig for information from other sources such as newsbooks , databases or open directories.  Search engines are not like Web Directories they are not maintained by people.  Search engines operate algorithmically which is to say that they are systematic they go step by step to find things from all sources. 

Before there were search engines there was a short list of webservers.  These web servers were all edited and controlled by Tim Berners-Lee and hosted by the CERN webserver.  As more and more people went online the list could not keep up.  On the NCSA Site new servers were announced under the title of “What’s New” and there was no limit to the number of sites. 

I have finally gained access to the Blog site!  HOORAH!!!