Search Engine Trivia
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46 free Search Engine trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Search engine trivia for the terminally curious, the SEO crowd, and anyone old enough to remember typing a question to a butler called Jeeves. The quiz starts before the web: Vannevar Bush's memex, WHOIS, and Archie, the FTP index written at McGill in 1990 whose name is just 'archive' without the v. Then the early web scramble: the hand-edited CERN list, W3Catalog, JumpStation, WebCrawler's first full-text index, Lycos the wolf spider, Yahoo's directory, and AltaVista built to show off DEC's hardware. The middle rounds are about the engine that ate the web: BackRub, the paper on 'The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine', the misspelling of googol, Susan Wojcicki's garage, the Burning Man doodle, PageRank's debt to Robin Li's RankDex, and 'to google' entering the dictionary. Later questions cover Bing and its GPT-4 chatbot, DuckDuckGo's privacy pitch, Baidu, Yandex, Naver, robots.txt, the SEO hats, and the 2024 ruling that Google's search dominance was an illegal monopoly. Questions run from easy to expert and every answer was checked against a reference page and carries its source. See also our Google, internet and technology quizzes.
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Q 01What did Vannevar Bush call his hypothetical desk-sized information machine of 1945, a forerunner of hypertext?
the memex
Bush described the memex, a desk linking microfilmed records by associative 'trails', in his 1945 essay 'As We May Think'; a young Douglas Engelbart read it and went on to build working hypertext.
Q 02What was the first well-documented search engine, which indexed public FTP sites from September 1990, called?
Archie
Archie is simply 'archive' without the v: its author Alan Emtage has said it had nothing to do with the comics, though the later search tools Veronica and Jughead were named to match.
Q 03HotBot, launched in 1996 on Inktomi's technology, was created by which magazine?
Wired
Wired magazine's online arm HotWired launched HotBot in May 1996 on Inktomi's search technology; two years later Lycos bought the engine along with the rest of Wired's web business.
Q 04Before 1993, how was the list of existing World Wide Web servers maintained?
By hand
It was kept by hand: Tim Berners-Lee edited a list of web servers on CERN's own site until, as new servers multiplied in 1993, the central list could no longer keep up.
Q 05Matthew Gray's 1993 World Wide Web Wanderer, probably the first web robot, was built to do what?
measure the size of the web
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.
Q 06AltaVista's 1997 translation service Babel Fish took its name from a creature invented by which author?
Douglas Adams
Douglas Adams put the Babel fish in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: slip one in your ear and you understand any language, the trick AltaVista's service promised for web pages.
Q 07Which 1994 search engine was among the first to let users search any word on any page?
WebCrawler
WebCrawler, built by Brian Pinkerton as a student at the University of Washington, launched in April 1994; little more than a year later America Online bought it.
Q 08Lycos, which began in 1994 as a Carnegie Mellon research project, takes its name from the Latin family name of which spider?
wolf spider
Lycos is short for Lycosidae, the wolf spider family, hunters that run down their prey instead of spinning webs; Michael Mauldin built the engine at Carnegie Mellon.
Q 09Yahoo!, founded in January 1994 by Jerry Yang and David Filo, began as what kind of product?
a web directory
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.
Q 10AltaVista was created by researchers at which computer company, partly to show off its hardware?
Digital Equipment Corporation
Digital Equipment Corporation launched AltaVista in 1995 at altavista.digital.com; so many users typed altavista.com and landed on another firm's site that Compaq later paid a reported $3.3 million for the name.
Q 11In 1996, five search engines each paid $5 million a year for a place on which company's browser search page?
Netscape
Netscape's search button had pointed to one site at a time, first Yahoo and then Excite; from 1996 those two, Magellan, Lycos and Infoseek each paid to share the page instead.
Q 12The butler mascot of the 1990s search engine Ask Jeeves was named after a valet created by which author?
P. G. Wodehouse
P. G. Wodehouse's Jeeves, the valet who steers Bertie Wooster out of trouble, fronted a site that invited questions in plain English; the company dropped him in 2006 and relaunched as Ask.com.
Q 13Which Google advertising product, launched in 2000, sold placement against search terms, an idea pioneered by the small rival GoTo.com?
AdWords
Q 21In June 2006, weeks ahead of Merriam-Webster, which dictionary added 'google' as a verb?
Oxford English Dictionary
The Oxford English Dictionary added the verb on 15 June 2006; that October Google, wary of its trademark going generic, asked people to use the word only for searches made on Google itself.
Q 22A 2000s 'Google bomb' made the search 'miserable failure' lead to which politician's official biography?
George W. Bush
George W. Bush's White House biography topped the results from late 2003 because bloggers had linked to it using that phrase; in 2007 Google changed its algorithm to defuse such pranks.
Q 23Google's 2013 algorithm overhaul emphasising natural-language queries was codenamed after which bird?
AdWords borrowed GoTo.com's idea of having advertisers bid for placement on search terms; GoTo, by then renamed Overture, sued Google over it in 2002 and the case was settled two years later.
Q 14As a Stanford research project, Google went by what nickname, because it analysed backlinks?
BackRub
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.
Q 15The name Google is a misspelling of 'googol', a number written as 1 followed by how many zeros?
100
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.
Q 16Inktomi, founded in 1996, took its name from a trickster spider spirit of which Great Plains people?
Lakota
Inktomi's founders Eric Brewer and Paul Gauthier named it after Iktomi, the trickster spider of Lakota legend, who is known for outsmarting far larger adversaries.
Q 17RankDex, a link-scoring search engine built by Robin Li in 1996, is cited in the patent for which Google algorithm?
PageRank
PageRank's patent names Li's engine, built at a Dow Jones unit, as an earlier system that used the links pointing at a page; Li took the idea home to China and started his own search company in 2000.
Q 18Whose garage did Page and Brin use as an office when Google was set up in 1998?
Susan Wojcicki's
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.
Q 19The very first Google Doodle, in 1998, told users the founders were away at which event?
Burning Man
The 30 August 1998 doodle tucked a stick figure behind the logo to show the founders were at Burning Man, a jokey out-of-office note posted days before Google was even incorporated.
Q 20In May 2010, Google's first playable doodle marked the 30th anniversary of which arcade game?
Pac-Man
Pac-Man took over the logo for 48 hours because, Google said, it was 'too cool to keep for just one day'; its doodlers rebuilt the original game's logic, sounds and even its bugs.
Hummingbird
Hummingbird, named for the bird's speed and precision, had already been running quietly for about a month when Google announced it in September 2013.
Q 24Google's search information boxes, added in May 2012, draw on a database called the what?
Knowledge Graph
The Knowledge Graph lets Google treat a query as a real-world thing instead of a string of letters, so a search for 'Taj Mahal' can tell the monument from the musician.
Q 25The 2024 US ruling that Google held an illegal search monopoly turned partly on billions it paid which company for default placement?
Apple
Apple's Safari default was the biggest of the placement deals at trial; Judge Amit Mehta found that tens of billions in guaranteed payments left Apple with little reason to build a search engine of its own.
Q 26Bing, announced by Steve Ballmer in May 2009, replaced which predecessor brand?
Live
Bing replaced Live Search, and within two months Microsoft had struck a deal for it to power Yahoo's search results as well.
Q 27Seznam, a search engine launched in 1996, was Google's main rival for years in which European country?
Czechia
Czechia's Seznam ('list') began as a student's catalogue of Czech websites and added its own search a year later; Google only became the country's dominant engine in the early 2010s.
Q 28The chatbot Microsoft built into Bing in February 2023, later renamed Copilot, ran on which model?
GPT-4
Microsoft confirmed in March 2023 that the new Bing ran on OpenAI's GPT-4; after very long early chats confused the model, it capped conversations at five turns per session.
Q 29DuckDuckGo, founded in 2008 by Gabriel Weinberg, takes its name from what?
a children's game
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.
Q 30Which search engine's name comes from a Song dynasty poem about searching for someone in a crowd?
Baidu
Baidu takes its name from a line by the poet Xin Qiji about searching a festival crowd again and again, only to turn and find the person standing where the light is dimmest.