New Delhi: Google has become synonymous with search engines. When it was first starting out in 1998, however, it was competing with names such as Yahoo, Ask Jeeves and AltaVista for a share of the pie, Straits Times reported.
Founded in 1994, Yahoo was once a global leader in e-mail, online news and search until the start of the 21st century.
However, the company was swiftly overtaken by rivals like Gmail and Hotmail in its main search and display ad businesses, while its news aggregation fell behind Facebook, Twitter and other digital channels, the BBC reported.
With most of its revenue coming from selling advertising space, the company’s sales declined as its audience drifted to other platforms, Straits Times reported.
Back when the Internet was mainly used by academia and governments, Mosaic Communications Corporation launched Netscape Navigator, becoming one of the first graphical Web browsers in 1994.
However, Microsoft soon launched the rival Internet Explorer, sparking a tussle to take control of the browser market, Straits Times reported.
Mosaic, which rebranded as Netscape Communications, partnered American Web portal Excite to power its search engine. Netscape was acquired by America Online (AOL) in 1998.
Although AOL officially shuttered Netscape Navigator in 2008, the open-source Mozilla Project founded on Netscape browser’s code continued, eventually birthing the popular Firefox browser, the report said.
Users of the now defunct Internet Explorer will remember MSN Search, which was Microsoft’s default search engine in the 1990s and 2000s.
The service, introduced in 1998, outsourced its search engine to several companies until Microsoft built its own Web crawler.
This was rebranded as Windows Live Search and eventually Bing in 2009.
That year, Microsoft and Yahoo announced a decade-long deal that replaced the Yahoo search engine with Bing, Straits Times reported.
In 2023, Bing was revamped to include a new chatbot feature based on OpenAI’s Chat GPT-4, which helped it hit 100 million active users in March.
AltaVista was one of the earliest search engines to index vast quantities of websites after it was launched in 1995.
The search engine was popular because it had indexed about 20 million webpages, outstripping its rivals at the time, and had fast computers that could swiftly churn results, the BBC reported.
The software was created by computer scientists in the research labs of Digital Equipment Corporation.
In 2001, the number of searches on Google overtook AltaVista, which until then had been one of the top Web destinations.
More than a decade later, Yahoo pulled the plug on the search engine in 2013 along with several products, Straits Times reported.
WebCrawler was reportedly the first search engine to allow users to search for text in any webpage, a method that would become common for major search engines.
It was developed by a University of Washington student Brian Pinkerton during his free time and launched in 1994.
The next year, AOL bought WebCrawler and added its arachnid mascot named Spidey, Straits Times said.
In 1996, the search engine was the second most visited website on the Internet, The Washington Post reported.
But WebCrawler was sold less than two years later in 1997 to Excite, which eventually went bankrupt.
WebCrawler has changed hands several times and continues to exist today, making it one of the oldest surviving search engines, Straits Times reported.
In 1996, the search engine was the second most visited website on the Internet, The Washington Post reported.
The website known as Ask Jeeves was co-founded in 1996 by technologist David Warthern and venture capitalist Garett Gruener, who dreamt of a service that could speak with people using natural language processing, Straits Times reported.
Lacking the necessary technology, the website, named after the fictional butler, morphed into a question-answering service coded to recognise certain words and provide broad answers to these questions, according to The Atlantic.
Its domain was created on November 29, 1995.
By 1999, the website was answering 1 million queries daily, online magazine Mental Floss reported.
As Ask Jeeves expanded in both size and popularity, trouble cropped up. For example, as its question database expanded into the millions, some answers became less relevant, according to online publication Search Engine Watch, Straits Times reported.
By the 2000s, the dot-com bubble had burst, sending advertisers fleeing from Web development and causing millions in losses for the company.
The website was reconfigured to be more search-oriented with a third-party engine, and the company reported a profit in 2003 due to an ad revenue tie-up with Google, according to Mental Floss.
In 2005, it was bought by New York-based InterActive Corp, with Ask Jeeves replaced with the more generic Ask.com the following year, Straits Times reported.
–IANS
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