As many early search engines fade away, Google continues to
improve
When the ability to search through even a small part of the Web's
holdings first appeared in 1995, it looked little short of
miraculous. Although we take this facility for granted now, it
seems likely that it was the constant improvement in public search
engines that helped make the Web a mass medium.
In a sense, things began with
Yahoo. This is a
directory, rather than a search engine, but it opened people's eyes
to both the richness of the then-young Web, and the power of being
able to search through it.
One of the first true search engines was
Lycos, which was named
after a running spider - the software robots that follow the links
of the Web and catalogue the pages they find there are often called
spiders. In March 1995, I marvelled at how Lycos had indexed a
"massive"
1.75 million Web pages. Lycos is still very much with us, but other
early search engines have faded since those pioneering days.
For example, I wonder whether many people use
Webcrawler.
It still exists, but as part of Excite its future must be
uncertain, given the way that Excite has sold off many of its
assets. Another early search engine that now leads only
a ghostly twilight existence is the
World
Wide Web Worm, whose opening page is mirrored in
Colombia.
I wrote about the
Galaxy service back in
October 1994; remarkably, it is still around, though much changed
from its early form (there is an interesting
history
avaialble). One year later I mentioned
Open Text's engine;
the site exists, but the search facility is long gone.
At least
Altavista
is still going strong - but perhaps not as strong as it might have
done. When I first wrote about it six years ago, Altavista seemed
to represent a next-generation service, so powerful were its
searches. Alas, that early lead was squandered as Altavista
gradually lost its way. Today, it is one of the better sites for
searching, but it has definitely been supplanted by a more recent
arrival -
Google.
As with Altavista, it was Google's underlying technology that
clearly placed it ahead of the pack when it first appeared. But
what is remarkable is that it has succeeded in maintaining that
position despite fierce competition. Google seems to have achieved
this through a single-minded devotion to providing the best search
engine on the Internet and not getting distracted by trying to turn
itself into a broader portal (as Altavista did).
There is a
history
of the company and a
timeline.
By June 2000, Google was already claiming to be the Web's biggest
search engine, with more than one billion indexed Web pages, a
figure that has now risen to three billion.
One of Google's great strengths is the breadth of its offering - it
allows you to search for images as well as through its huge archive
of Usenet postings (acquired from Deja.com). Also worth noting is
the
advanced
search option and the topic-specific searches. These
include searches for the
Apple Macintosh
world and
GNU/Linux.
Google's support for open source is hardly surprising, since it
derives its power from the world's largest GNU/Linux cluster - an
extraordinary 10,000 machines (
www.google.com/press/highlights.html).
The only worry is that Google might be tempted to lose its focus as
it chases after higher revenues. So far, its track record is
exemplary, but, given his disastrous time at Novell, the
appointment of
Eric
Schmidt as Google's chief executive does not augur well.