How many times have you googled something today? Maybe you looked up the definition of a word, or lyrics to a new song you just heard, or a new recipe for dinner tonight. Each time you did this, you used a search engine.
What is a search engine? According to Merriam-Webster, a search engine is a site that “uses software to locate key words in other sites”. The most well-known example of this is Google; it’s so widespread that “to google” has become a verb. Plenty of other search engines exist, such as Bing, Yahoo!. DuckDuckGo, and Ecosia. Before Google became the most popular search engine worldwide, there were several predecessors that paved the way.
The first piece of software that was truly considered a search engine was Archie, whose nickname was shortened from the word “archives” and full title was Archie Query Form. Launched in 1990, Archie only included the title of files in its index, not the content. This meant that if you wanted to search for an article about a specific dog breed — a poodle, for example — but there was an article with the title “A List of Dog Breeds,” that article would not show up in your search. Two other search engines with improvements on Archie were created a couple of years later, named Veronica and Jughead to continue in the theme of the famous Archie comics.
Many other search engines were created in the 90s, all with their own flaws and varying degrees of success. Yahoo! was created in 1994, two years before BackRub, the origin of Google. Yahoo! was more of a directory than a true search engine, meaning that it was essentially a large alphabetized list of websites. By the time that Yahoo! started to develop its own true search technology, it had been using Google’s search capabilities for several years and was already overtaken in popularity. Google, on the other hand, continued to grow. The verb “to google” was added to both the Merriam-Webster and Oxford English dictionaries in 2006. According to Statistica, Google holds 88.47% of the global market share of search engines as of April 2019. Bing holds the second most market share at only 4.81%. Though a few search engines that focus on user privacy, like DuckDuckGo, or plant trees using the profits of advertisements, like Ecosia, have gained some popularity, Google continues to dominate the field.
