In the early nineties, when the Internet was just beginning to spread, there was practically no point in search engines. There were few users, and even fewer sites, so standard catalogs were enough.
The first search engines
The situation began to change with the increase in the total number of sites, when the search for the necessary information turned into a real problem. The first attempts to create search engines belonged to students of American and Canadian universities, but search technologies were quite primitive, until the appearance of WebCrawler in 1994. This search engine was the first to analyze the entire text of websites.
The stage began when the evolution of search engines began to develop at a rapid pace. Already in 1995, AltaVista was launched, a search system that could search not only text, but also images, music and video files. Soon, Yahoo and Google, launched in 1997, competed with it.
The history of Google
Of course, Google, created by graduate students at Stanford University, did not immediately rank with the leading search engines. Lack of funding and free time even forced its creators, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, to put up their brainchild for sale, but Google then did not interest anyone, and graduate students were forced to leave their studies in order to be able to develop their project.
Following the solution of the problem of free time, the problem with financing was also solved, and in such a way that it was possible to attract large investors and not lose the opportunity to independently manage the company, which was an important moment for the founders of Google.
The work did not stand still, and after a while Google launched a project with the help of which a stream of impressive profits was established. As opponents of ads on the home page of their own site, the creators of Google launched contextual advertising in 2000. These are links to advertisers' sites, and they appear only when users request a given topic, which makes this ad unobtrusive.
Having revolutionized the commercial profitability of search engines, Google has not stopped developing in technical terms, more and more improving search technologies, which allowed this company to become the world leader among search engines.
History of domestic search engines
In parallel with the development of foreign search engines, search engines were being developed in Russia, which were adapted for the Russian Internet. The first of these systems was the brainchild of the Agama company, which appeared in 1996 and was called Aport.
Unfortunately, its history was short-lived: constant resale from hand to hand, the pursuit of profit and insufficient attention to technical developments quickly made Aport uncompetitive.
A similar fate awaited Rambler, another Russian search engine, although its extinction was much slower, and by and large it did not cease to exist, albeit only as a branch of Yandex, a search engine that eventually became the leader of the Russian Internet, dividing the Russian market with Google about fifty-fifty.
