A search engine is designed to search for information on the World Wide Web. Information may consist of web pages, images and other types of files. In 1993, Matthew Gray at MIT developed the first Web search engine Wandex. There were over 1000 search engines providing varying search results to online users. Popular among them are Ask.com (formerly Ask Jeeves), Baidu (Chinese), Cuil, Exalead (French), Gigablast, Google, Live Search (formerly MSN Search), gou (Chinese), Sohu (Chinese), Wikia Search, Yahoo! Search. Top ten search engine based on the Nielsen//NetRatings, 2007 are
Provider Share of Total Searches
Google 55.2 Percent
Yahoo 21.9 Percent
MSN/Windows Live 9 Percent
AOL 5.4 Percent
Ask.com 1.8 Percent
My Web Search 1 Percent
Comcast 0.5 Percent
EarthLink 0.4 Percent
Dogpile.com 0.4 Percent
My Way 0.4 Percent
Other 3.9 Percent
All search 100 Percent
Source: Nielsen//NetRatings, 2007
Most of the search engine derived their revenues through advertisements and paid listings, a good many served as secondary service offerings. The industry saw many other players who also offered compatible services on competitive pricings. The smaller players targeted niche segments offering differentiated service or distinctive search technology. Since 1993 industry has seen various launches (see list) few of them survived and few had a premature death.
The best search engines launches:
Year Event Search Engine
1993 Launch Aliweb
1994 Launch WebCrawler
1994 Launch Infoseek
1994 Launch Lycos
1995 Launch (part of DEC) AltaVista
1995 Launch Excite
1996 Founded HotBot
1996 Founded Ask Jeeves
1998 Launch Google
1999 Founded Teoma
2000 Founded Baidu
2003 Launch Info.com
2004 Final launch Yahoo! Search
2004 Launch A9.com
2006 Founded Quaero
2006 Launch Live Search
2006 Beta Launch ChaCha
2006 Beta Launch Guruji.com
2007 Launched Wikiseek
2008 Launched Cuil
The fact remains unchallenged and probably there is no parallel to Google.
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