I must be really old because I still remember the time when google was the newcomer and altavista was #1 - as big as google is today (well the web was smaller but anyway) ps. Wikipedia claims that the first engine was called "wandax" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine also tells a lot more about first search engines.
I always assumed Altavista or Excite were the oldest, but I swear that I remember plenty of them from the early / mid nineties that are now defunct.
I remember back in the day before the internet was mainstream, I was the first one in my area to connect to the internet using a slip connection with winsock. I was using Lycos at the time. This was back in the day of 2400 baud dialup modems... that was my upgrade to my 1200 baud! Funny thing is... it was only 13 years ago...
See what wiki says The very first tool used for searching on the Internet was Archie. Started in 1900 but it was not exactly like today's search engines but was mainly used to index computer files . Next was Gopher which started one year later and was very popular. It was mainly indexing text documents Then came Veronica and Jughead The first Web search engine was Wandex, a now-defunct index collected by the World Wide Web Wanderer, a web crawler developed by Matthew Gray at MIT in 1993. Another very early search engine, Aliweb, also appeared in 1993, and still runs today. The first "full text" crawler-based search engine was WebCrawler, which came out in 1994. Soon after, many search engines appeared and vied for popularity. These included Excite, Infoseek, Inktomi, Northern Light, and AltaVista. In some ways, they competed with popular directories such as Yahoo!. Later, the directories integrated or added on search engine technology for greater functionality. Search engines were also known as some of the brightest stars in the Internet investing frenzy that occurred in the late 1990s. Several companies entered the market spectacularly, receiving record gains during their initial public offerings. Some have taken down their public search engine, and are marketing enterprise-only editions, such as Northern Light. ------------ No doubt that google is worlds most popular search engine now
Archie wasn't used on the web, it was used on FTP serves. Thats why you can't find it Here's a web gateway to an Archie server in Hungary though: http://www.fsz.bme.hu/internet/AA.html Dunno if it works.
This is my favorite (former?) archie-like server: http://www.filesearch.ru/ I found lots of useful stuff through that site in the late 90's and the early 2000's(we're getting old, aren't we?). Now you have more interesting tools, such as bittorrent. About "engines" : I guess you are talking about a program with a non-human HTTP spider and a searchable index, in which case Altavista is the first.... Yahoo was human-made and lycos came after the DEC monster.... If you are really going to consider archie then you get a whole list of previous mainframe monsters included too.....basically, everytime you build an index(2000 years old) you have a search engine there...so what you are asking is actually what the oldest http robot-built index is.....(IMO)
Archie was around way before then...along with Jugghead, WAIS, Gopher (all Unix utilities....and not just comics). http://www.searchenginehistory.com/
Yep, I used Archie at university around 1993-4. I think I was using it to find Amiga software! There was also Gopher, which was a sort of search/indexing system, and Lycos was the first search engine I remember using, as well as Webspider (or was it Webcrawler?). Lycos was so basic that you had to keep trying different servers, something like lycos1.com, nope, lycos2.com till you found one that was not overloaded.
The oldest I know of was aliweb. Also for a long time yahoo search was powered by google, I remember that's why I switched from using yahoo to google because it was the same results with no pop-ups. I believe yahoo started their own search thing in 2004.