I think, the fist one was Hotbot or Lycos. Interesting fact that most of today biggest search engines (Yahoo, Google, MSN, Altavista, Hotbot, Lycos, Ask Jeeves) were founded in 1994. Definitely, THE year of the history
Yes, the Internet is not the web - the web runs on the Internet, but is not the Internet itself. Archie was the first search engine used on the Internet, but specifically it searched FTP sites. Google was 1998, not 1994. MSN search was founded in 2005. And as written in the thread, Hotbot and Lycos were NOT the first web search engines, although Lycos was 3rd or 4th (or something along those lines). Hotbot wasn't around until 1996.
Did anyone here actually use archie besides me, when it was popular? when i was in college in the very early 90's there was no www at the time, and tools like the newsgroups, ftp, irc and archie were considered the norm.
Yahoo was before Google, however Yahoo was not a search engine at the time and has only recently become so.
I think I've mentioned three times in this thread now that Yahoo was not a search engine. Whats the point of a thread if you don't read it and just reply with something already proved wrong?
interesting as far as i can remember yahoo come earlier than google but its widely known to be just directory (manual inclusion) with the search bar on it that will return search request to a SERP like page. Here is excerpt from inktomi this records is for 1996 i gather from the waybackmachine The first commercial application of Inktomi's innovative technology is the HotBotâ„¢ search engine service, offered in conjunction with HotWired, Wired magazine's electronic sibling. By leveraging this scalable technology, HotBot was the first search engine to index and search the entire World Wide Web, and represents the only search engine technology in existence that can expand to match the Web's growth as it doubles and doubles again. if inktomi claim is true HotBot is the first search engine to do the spidering, not sure what technology altavista and webcrawler uses at that time or maybe they just come later after hotbot if they use spidering anyway. for the internet search engine maybe archie is the first, according to the wiki pages anything left or error please add or correct
I think Altavista was the first what you call "search engine". Altavista's Scooter was the 1st robot, the fastest and biggest(a giant hall full of DEC Alphaserver's that sucked so much energy DEC had to sorround the place with generator groups providing extra juice). As someone else mentioned Yahoo was not an engine and most of the others did not have robots but instead bought feeds from "inktomi-like" feed providers. Altavista was THE engine IMHO. I recall Northern Light and Lycos, I do remember Lycos had its own spider at the beginning(lycos is named after a spider). I have fond memories of Infoseek - it changed the index and ranking overnight, you could test the algo almost in real time if you changed and resubmitted(the spider would obey your resubmition in almost real time). Altavista required me to wait a few days, I hated that(good times heh!). Google is almost 10 years old now. I remember my 1st impression using Google "holy crap you don't need to use +this -that". In altavista you had to use quotes and minuses and pluses to get anything useful. That was in 1999. Geez... I miss the old days...
According to archive.org Google goes back to 1998 >> http://web.archive.org/web/19981202230410/http://www.google.com/