AltaVista Search Engine History
Alta Vista was the first full text search engine in the history of search engines and thus it was rightly named AltaVista which means a view from the above. The search engine was created at Digital Equipment Corporations Western Research Laboratory under a team led by Louis Monier with the ability to store each and every word of every page indexed by the crawler. Within six months of its launch in December 1995, it went to the public with an index of 16 million documents.

AltaVista used 64-bit alpha servers which ensured the fastest search till then on the Internet. It was also the first search engine to provide qualitative search instead of quantitative search to search requests. Within two years of its launch, AltaVista was receiving 80 million hits a day. The main advantage that AltaVista has over other search engines was that it used a fast crawler that could cache and index web pages faster than was thought possible at that time. By 1996, Yahoo was using AltaVista exclusively to display search results.

When the company Digital was sold to Compaq in 1998, the new owners re-launched AltaVista as a web portal to compete with Yahoo. Since its focus shifted, it was unable to compete with a new search engine Google. After a series of buyouts and acquisitions, AltaVista is now a part of Yahoo. .

Google Search Engine History
Anybody using the Internet today is familiar with Google, the most popular search engine. Though a late starter as compared to other search engines, its exponential growth as made it the most used search engine on the World Wide Web. Google was started by two Stanford University graduate students Larry Page and Sergey Brin. It is widely believed that the name Google is a misspelling of the googol, a mathematical number denoted by 1 followed by 100 zeroes. The domain name for google.com was registered in September 1997, but the company was officially launched exactly a year later in September 1998.

Google’s popularity based on its simple design and quick search engine results were soon established and by 2000 it was the most used search engine on the web. It was in the same year that Google started using keywords to sell advertising space creating the AdSense model to earn revenues. Over the years, Google has developed a range of search options which include text search, image search, maps search, books search, News Search, etc.

The Google operations have been so successful in the history of serach engines, the term Google now means to undertake search on the web with the help of the Google search engine, an honour enjoyed by no other search engine.

History of Yahoo
Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle or more popularly known as Yahoo was started by two Stanford University students David Philo and Jerry Yang as an Internet Bookmarks list. They started the project as a way to easily track websites that they visited for professional or personal use. Though the bookmark index started of as “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web” they soon changed the name to the now popular Yahoo. The success of their directory convinced the two founders to approach Sequoia Capital, a silicon valley capitalist for funding of Yahoo Inc. as a business venture in 1995.

In the beginning, the company just added web pages to its directories. But, realising the potential, the company started charging for its directory listing. Though, most of the listings on the Yahoo directory are paid, a small percentage continues to be free listing. It soon diversified itself as a Web portal. Along the way, it acquired several other companies to increase its gamut of services. Yahoo was also one of the few companies that survived the dot-com bubble burst in the early 2000s. Today, Yahoo is one of the popular web portals that offers website, search engine and entertainment features to its users.

Lycos Search Engine History
In 1994 a research project was underway under guidance of Dr. Michael Mauldin at the Carneige Mellon University in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania to calculate the size of the web. While working on the project Dr. Mauldin Lycos, the spider robot was born. a search engine and web directory. Lycos was named after the wolf spider Lycosidea who are excellent hunters of their prey. As the name suggests Lycos introduced web crawlers on the Internet to cache and index web pages.

After its inception, a company by the name of Lycos Inc. was incorporated and Bob Davis was appointed its first CEO. Lycos was promoted as a search engine and web directory. The company policy was to promote Lycos as web portal that was fully supported by advertising on the web. The company was so successful that it became it was the most popular and most visited search engine by 1999. Lycos Inc. was the very first Startup in the history of Internet Business to earn a profit.

Lycos was acquired by Terra Networks for $5.4 billion in 2000, representing a return like none other. However, Terra Networls sold the company to Daum Communications Corporation for $95.4 million only. Today, Lycos propagates itself as a website offering entertainment content.