Searching for the Next Engine

Back in the days before the World Wide Web came along, there were a handful of search engines that helped you find the information you needed. Even in those nascent days of the Internet, the need for a search engine was apparent. Previously, you would just telnet into someone's server, and have a peek around their directory to see what they had. Of course, back in those days, there wasn't that much to be found on the Internet.

The first and biggest of these pre-web search engines was Archie in 1990. The staff members here at TechWatch had spent many of nights on Archie thinking it was the best thing since the creation of the Internet itself. Soon thereafter, Veronica and Jughead popped up (along with Gopher), all of which did nothing but find the information you were looking for.

So it was no surprise that some of the names that first became big on the web were the early seach engines such as AltaVista and Excite. This was at a time when Jerry Yang and David Filo started their own directory of the web, eventually calling it Yahoo, and promising their users that they would never sell out and put advertising on their website. A whole slew of search engines/web directories were born during the heady days of the mid-1990's, most of which today are nothing but curious footnotes in the history of the Internet. In fact there were so many of these search engines, all working in different ways, that aggregator search engines sprung up. These sites would automatically do a search on a number of the biggest and best search engines and then bring all the results back. Of these, the most notable was mamma.com ("the mother of all search engines"). Of this first batch of search engines, Yahoo quickly rose to the top of the list and dominated the field. It seemed like their reign would last a good long while.

And then Google came along in 1997 and changed everything. By this point, the search engines had morphed into 'web portals' and became hulking masses of confusion that were in the middle of an identity crisis. Google, with it's very simple layout and minimalist design (not to mention a superior search algorithm), slowly but surely started rising to the top of the search engines, all the while refusing to call themselves a search engine company (even though that was the only thing they did in those days).

And now, just over a decade later, Google is still king of the search engine. But is it time to start speculating if their reign is coming to an end? With new contenders such as Cuil (pronounced 'cool') and SearchMe (both of these engines look like the anti-Google with their black screens) trying to get into the game and older players like Microsoft and Yahoo trying to catch up, will it be long before a new champion is declared? Having used all of the aforementioned search engines for a while now, we feel that none of them are up to the challenge yet of being crowned the new king. Therefore we think that Google still has some breathing space yet in which to keep ahead of its competitors.