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Table of Contents

See Also

See Also in This Set

Advertising

America Online

Computers

Dot-coms

E-mail

Internet

Microsoft

Spam

Stock market

World Wide Web

Yahoo!

The 1990s in America

Search engines

by Howard Bromberg

Definition Technology that enabled the systematic retrieving of information from the World Wide Web

The World Wide Web contains billions of items of information located on its millions of sites. With the development of search engines in the 1990’s, Web users were able to locate quickly the information they queried. Becoming indispensable to Web use, search engines contributed to the cachet and soaring stock prices of Internet-related companies.

Various kinds of search engines retrieve data from computers, but it was the emergence of efficient Web search engines in the mid-1990’s that helped make the resources of the Internet widely available.

Google founders Larry Page, left, and Sergey Brin at the Googleplex headquarters in Mountain View, California. Google had become the dominant Internet search engine by the beginning of the twenty-first century.

ph_Search_engine.jpg

(AP/Wide World Photos)

The Internet is the worldwide network of interconnected computers. The Web is the collection of billions of pages containing information in standardized interface that can be accessed on the Internet through Web browsers. In 1990, the first search engine, Archie, was developed at McGill University, retrieving information from the then 300,000 Internet hosts. It was soon followed by rivals Veronica, Jughead, and Gopher. With the release of the Web to the public in 1991, a new generation of efficient search engines was developed that used “indexes” (the engine’s catalog of Web pages), “spiders” (programs that searched the Web to add pages to the index), and “relevancy software” that ranked retrieved pages for their match to the query. To use a search engine, the user formulates a search query, usually based on a combination of terms (Boolean) or natural language. The search engine instantly combs through billions of Web pages to retrieve those that match the search criteria. The success of a search engine depends largely on the number of Web pages in its index and its algorithms for generating the most relevant search results.

The launching of the search engine Excite in 1993 represented a breakthrough with Excite’s innovative statistical analysis of word relationships. The year 1994 saw the birth of Yahoo!, which included a directory classifying Web sites by subject category. Lycos (1994) pioneered the ranking of documents by relevance. Infoseek (1994) and AltaVista (1995) were metasearch engines, combining the results of individual search engines; AltaVista also offered a translation service and a search capability for sound and image files. Inktomi (1996) impressed with large-scale search capability made possible by using distributed network technology. Ask Jeeves (1997), now Ask, allowed for search queries in everyday language. Google, formed by two Stanford graduates in 1998, quickly became popular with its extensive search capabilities and such features as “cached,” which highlighted search terms in the document and displayed information from Web pages that had expired. By decade-end, search engines were processing tens of millions of searches daily, utilizing billions of indexed pages. With the dot-com bubble, search engine companies skyrocketed in stock price and status.

Impact

The emergence of increasingly powerful search engines in the 1990’s made vast resources of human intelligence available to any inquiry. Whatever fame and profit search engine companies achieved were a small reflection of the precise access to Web information that search engines made possible.

Further Reading

1 

Battelle, John. The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture. New York: Portfolio, 2005.

2 

Hock, Randolph. The Extreme Searcher’s Internet Handbook: A Guide for the Serious Searcher. Medford, N.J.: CyberAge Books, 2004.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
Bromberg, Howard. "Search Engines." The 1990s in America, edited by Milton Berman, Salem Press, 2009. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=1990_1495.
APA 7th
Bromberg, H. (2009). Search engines. In M. Berman (Ed.), The 1990s in America. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Bromberg, Howard. "Search Engines." Edited by Milton Berman. The 1990s in America. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2009. Accessed October 22, 2025. online.salempress.com.