46 Fun Facts About Search Engine

What did Vannevar Bush call his hypothetical desk-sized information machine of 1945, a forerunner of hypertext?

Bush described the memex, a desk that stored books and records on microfilm linked by associative 'trails', in his July 1945 Atlantic Monthly essay 'As We May Think'.

What was the first well-documented search engine, which indexed public FTP sites from September 1990, called?

The name is simply 'archive' without the v; it was written by Alan Emtage at McGill University in Montreal.

HotBot, launched in 1996 on Inktomi's technology, was created by which magazine?

Wired magazine's online arm HotWired launched HotBot in May 1996, running on Inktomi's search technology.

Before 1993, how was the list of existing World Wide Web servers maintained?

It was kept By hand: Tim Berners-Lee edited the list of web servers hosted at CERN, and NCSA announced new ones on its 'What's New' page.

Matthew Gray's 1993 World Wide Web Wanderer, probably the first web robot, was built to do what?

Matthew Gray wrote the Wanderer at MIT to measure the size of the web; its crawls fed an index called Wandex, and it kept running until late 1995.

Which December 1993 tool was the first to combine crawling, indexing and querying in a web search engine?

JumpStation, written by Jonathon Fletcher at the University of Stirling, used a robot to crawl and index pages and a web form to query them.

Which 1994 search engine was among the first to let users search any word on any web page?

WebCrawler, launched by Brian Pinkerton at the University of Washington in April 1994, offered the first public full-text index of web pages.

Lycos, launched in 1994 as a Carnegie Mellon spin-off, takes its name from the Latin for what animal?

Lycos is short for Lycosidae, the Latin family name of the wolf spider; Michael Mauldin started it as a Carnegie Mellon research project.

Yahoo!, founded in January 1994 by Jerry Yang and David Filo, began as what kind of product?

Yahoo! started as a web directory, a hierarchy of links sorted into categories by its editors; the search added in 1995 covered only those listings.

AltaVista was created by researchers at which computer company, partly to show off its hardware?

AltaVista was built in 1995 at Digital Equipment Corporation's Western Research Lab in Palo Alto, partly to demonstrate its 64-bit Alpha processors; Yahoo shut it down in 2013.

How much per year did each of five search engines pay Netscape in 1996 to rotate on its search page?

Netscape wanted one exclusive partner, but demand was so strong that five engines — Yahoo!, Magellan, Lycos, Infoseek and Excite — each paid $5 million a year to rotate on its page.

Ask Jeeves, founded in 1996, was distinctive for letting users do what?

Ask Jeeves invited users to ask questions in natural language, such as 'Where can I find a hotel in Paris?', fronted by a butler modelled on P. G. Wodehouse's valet; it was later rebranded Ask.com.

Which small rival pioneered paid search-term advertising, an idea Google later adopted?

goto.com, launched by Bill Gross's Idealab in 1998, auctioned search placements to advertisers; Google adopted the model for AdWords, and goto.com (renamed Overture) later sued over it.

As a Stanford research project, Google went by what nickname, because it analysed backlinks?

Page and Brin called the project BackRub in 1996 because it analysed the web's 'back links'; the name Google came later, from a misspelling of googol.

The name Google is a misspelling of 'googol', a number written as 1 followed by how many zeros?

A googol is 1 followed by 100 zeros (10 to the 100th power); the founders wanted a name suggesting a vast number of pages, and their campus, the Googleplex, echoes googolplex.

Inktomi, founded in 1996, took its name from a trickster spider spirit of which people?

Inktomi's founders Eric Brewer and Paul Gauthier named it after Iktomi, the trickster spider spirit of Lakota legend, a nod to the spider-like web crawler.

Larry Page's PageRank patent cites RankDex, developed in 1996 by which future search entrepreneur?

Robin Li built RankDex in 1996 while at IDD Information Services, scoring pages by their inbound links; he went on to found Baidu in 2000.

Whose garage did Page and Brin use as an office when Google was set up in 1998?

They rented Susan Wojcicki's garage in Menlo Park in September 1998; Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun, had written the company's first investment cheque that August.

The very first Google Doodle, in 1998, told users the founders were away at which event?

The 30 August 1998 doodle put a stick figure behind the logo to show the founders were at Burning Man in the Nevada desert, a heads-up in case the servers crashed.

In May 2010, Google's first playable doodle marked the 30th anniversary of which arcade game?

It was created with Namco; regular staff doodles began when Dennis Hwang drew one for Bastille Day 2000.

The verb 'to google' entered the Oxford English Dictionary in which year?

The OED added 'google' as a verb in June 2006, with Merriam-Webster following that July; Google discourages generic use of the word to protect its trademark.

By 2012, roughly how many searches a day was Google handling?

By May 2016 it was processing 100 billion searches a month.

Google's 2013 algorithm overhaul emphasising natural-language queries was codenamed after which bird?

Hummingbird, announced in September 2013 around Google's 15th birthday, rewrote the core algorithm to weigh the meaning of whole conversational queries rather than individual keywords.

Google's search information boxes, added in May 2012, draw on a database called the what?

The Knowledge Graph, launched on 16 May 2012, began with some 500 million entities and tripled in size within seven months; it feeds the panels of facts shown beside results.

In August 2024 a US federal court ruled that Google's dominance in search amounted to what?

Judge Amit Mehta found on 5 August 2024 that Google had maintained an illegal monopoly in general search, partly by paying Apple and others to be their default engine.

Bing, announced by Steve Ballmer in May 2009, replaced which predecessor brand?

Bing replaced Live Search, the brand Microsoft had used since dropping 'Windows' from the Windows Live Search name; the line began with MSN Search in 1998.

Which home-grown search engine long competed with Google in the Czech Republic?

Seznam, launched by Ivo Lukačovič in 1996, began as a catalogue of Czech websites and for years held a large share of Czech searches before Google overtook it.

The chatbot Microsoft built into Bing in February 2023, later renamed Copilot, ran on which model?

Microsoft confirmed in March 2023 that the new Bing ran on OpenAI's GPT-4, tuned for search under the codename Prometheus; early users found it strikingly argumentative.

DuckDuckGo, founded in 2008 by Gabriel Weinberg, takes its name from what?

Weinberg took the name from a children's game, duck duck goose, saying he simply liked the sound of it; the Paoli, Pennsylvania company later built its brand on not tracking users.

Baidu's name comes from a poem written during which Chinese dynasty?

Baidu ('hundreds of times') is taken from a Song dynasty poem by Xin Qiji about searching a festival crowd again and again for a lost figure; the company says it evokes persistent searching for the ideal.

Google exited mainland China in which year, after disputes over censorship and cybersecurity?

In March 2010, after the Operation Aurora hacks and a refusal to keep censoring results, Google redirected google.cn users to its uncensored Hong Kong site.

The name Yandex, coined by Arkady Volozh and Ilya Segalovich, stands for what?

Segalovich coined Yandex in 1993 as 'yet another indexer', a pun that also reads as 'Я' ('I' in Russian) plus index; the search engine itself launched later that decade.

In late 2023, roughly what share of the search market in Russia did Yandex hold?

StatCounter put Yandex at About 73% of Russian searches in late 2023, with Google taking most of the rest at roughly a quarter.

Which home-grown engine held a majority of South Korea's search market through the 2010s and early 2020s?

Naver, launched in 1999, kept Korean users with its own Q&A service, blogs and cafés; local measurements gave it well over half of domestic searches for more than a decade.

The standard file that tells web crawlers which parts of a site they may visit is called what?

A site's robots.txt file, placed at its root, implements the Robots Exclusion Protocol proposed by Martijn Koster in 1994; compliance is entirely voluntary.

Infoseek, a leading 1990s search engine, was bought outright in 1999 by which entertainment company?

Disney bought a stake in Infoseek in 1998 and the remainder in 1999, folding the engine into its Go.com portal, which it shut in 2001.

Most search engines support which three Boolean operators to refine a query?

AND, OR and NOT are the Boolean operators most engines recognise, narrowing, widening or excluding terms; some also support proximity operators such as NEAR.

According to Danny Sullivan, the phrase 'search engine optimization' came into use in which year?

Industry analyst Danny Sullivan dated the phrase to 1997, a year in which engines were already tweaking their algorithms to counter keyword-stuffing by webmasters.

SEO techniques that search engines disapprove of are known by what colour of hat?

Such tactics are called black hat SEO — hidden text, link farms and cloaking among them — and can get a site penalised or removed; guideline-abiding methods are 'white hat'.

Yahoo! acquired Overture in 2003, gaining which two search engines?

Overture had itself bought AlltheWeb and AltaVista earlier in 2003, so Yahoo!'s $1.6 billion purchase that October brought both engines along with Overture's paid-search business.

Which much-hyped 2008 search engine, founded by ex-Google engineers, buckled on its launch day?

Cuil, launched on 28 July 2008 by former Googlers Anna Patterson and Russell Power, claimed the web's largest index, struggled under launch-day traffic and closed two years later.

Alan Emtage wrote the first internet search tool while a student at which Montreal university?

Emtage, a Barbados-born graduate student and systems administrator at McGill, wrote the tool to keep track of the files on the FTP servers he managed.

What was the name of the web crawler Microsoft introduced in 2004 when it moved to its own search technology?

msnbot first crawled the web in 2004 as Microsoft built its own index; its results replaced licensed Inktomi listings when MSN Search relaunched in early 2005.

Gopher, whose rise spawned the search tools Veronica and Jughead, was created in 1991 at which university?

Mark McCahill's team at the University of Minnesota released Gopher in 1991, named for the school's mascot; its menus of files were what Veronica and Jughead searched by title.

In which year did Yahoo! acquire Inktomi, the engine that had powered its search results?

Yahoo! agreed to buy Inktomi for about $235 million in December 2002, then bought Overture the next year and launched its own engine from the pieces in early 2004.

W3Catalog, the web's first primitive search engine from September 1993, was built at which university?

Oscar Nierstrasz built W3Catalog at the University of Geneva in September 1993 with Perl scripts that mirrored existing manually maintained catalogues into one searchable format.