Search Engine

A tool is designed to search information on internet is known as search engine. User can search web pages, impages and other types of files. Search engine works as a mixture of algorithmic and human input. The first tool used for searching on the internet was Archie. The program downloaded the directory listings of all the files located on public anonymous FTP (File Transfer Protocol) sites, creating a database of file names; however, rchive did not index the contents of these files.

Gopher led to two new search programs, Veronica and Jughead. Like Archie, they searched the file names and titles stored in Gopher index systems. Veronica (Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index to Computerized Archives) provided a keyword search of most Gopher menu titles in the entire Gopher listings. Jughead (Jonzy's Universal Gopher Hierarchy Excavation And Display) was a tool for obtaining menu information from specific Gopher servers. While the name of the search engine "Archie" was not a reference to the Archie comic book series, "Veronica"' and "Jughead" are characters in the series, thus referencing their predecessor.

Wandex was the first web search engine. Another very early search engine, Aliweb, also appeared in 1993, and still runs today.JumpStatioin (released in early 1994) used a crawler to find web pages for searching, but search was limited to the title of web pages only. One of the first "full text" crawler-based search engines was WebCrawler, which came out in 1994. Unlike its predecessors, it let users search for any word in any webpage, which became the standard for all major search engines since. It was also the first one to be widely known by the public.

Google search engine rose to prominence. The company achieved better results for many searches with an innovation called PageRank. This iterative algorithm ranks web pages based on the number and PageRank of other web sites and pages that link there, on the premise that good or desirable pages are linked to more than others. Google also maintained a minimalist interface to its search engine. In contrast, many of its competitors embedded a search engine in a web portal .

As of late 2007, Google was by far the most popular Web search engine worldwide. A number of country-specific search engine companies have become prominent.