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`Search Engine History.com
`
`EARLY HISTORY DIRECTORIES SEM GOOGLE YAHOO! MICROSOFT
`
`Early Technology
`Before the Web
`Tim Berners-Lee & the
`WWW
`How do Search Engines
`Work?
`The First Search Engine
`Directories
`Directories
`Search Engines vs
`Directories
`Vertical Search
`Early Search Engines
`Meta Search
`Vertical Search
`Search Engine Marketing
`Paid Inclusion
`Pay Per Click
`SEO
`Current Market Forces
`Google
`Yahoo!
`Microsoft
`Legal Issues
`Learn More
`Search Conferences
`Sources & Further Reading
`As Referenced By
`
`History of Search Engines: From 1945 to Google Today
`As We May Think (1945):
`The concept of hypertext and a memory extension really came to life in July of 1945, when
`after enjoying the scientific camaraderie that was a side effect of WWII, Vannevar Bush's As
`We May Think was published in The Atlantic Monthly.
`
`He urged scientists to work together to help build a body of knowledge for all mankind. Here
`are a few selected sentences and paragraphs that drive his point home.
`
`Specialization becomes increasingly necessary for progress, and the effort to bridge
`between disciplines is correspondingly superficial.
`
`The difficulty seems to be, not so much that we publish unduly in view of the extent
`and variety of present day interests, but rather that publication has been extended
`far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record. The summation of
`human experience is being expanded at a prodigious rate, and the means we use for
`threading through the consequent maze to the momentarily important item is the same
`as was used in the days of square-rigged ships.
`
`A record, if it is to be useful to science, must be continuously extended, it must be
`stored, and above all it must be consulted.
`
`He not only was a firm believer in storing data, but he also believed that if the data source
`was to be useful to the human mind we should have it represent how the mind works to the
`best of our abilities.
`
`Our ineptitude in getting at the record is largely caused by the artificiality of the
`systems of indexing. ... Having found one item, moreover, one has to emerge from
`the system and re-enter on a new path.
`
`The human mind does not work this way. It operates by association. ... Man
`cannot hope fully to duplicate this mental process artificially, but he certainly ought to
`be able to learn from it. In minor ways he may even improve, for his records have
`relative permanency.
`
`Presumably man's spirit should be elevated if he can better review his own shady past
`and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems. He has built a
`civilization so complex that he needs to mechanize his records more fully if he is to
`push his experiment to its logical conclusion and not merely become bogged down
`part way there by overtaxing his limited memory.
`
`He then proposed the idea of a virtually limitless, fast, reliable, extensible, associative
`memory storage and retrieval system. He named this device a memex.
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`Gerard Salton (1960s - 1990s):
`Gerard Salton, who died on August 28th of 1995, was the father of modern search
`technology. His teams at Harvard and Cornell developed the SMART informational retrieval
`system. Salton’s Magic Automatic Retriever of Text included important concepts like the
`vector space model, Inverse Document Frequency (IDF), Term Frequency (TF), term
`discrimination values, and relevancy feedback mechanisms.
`
`He authored a 56 page book called A Theory of Indexing which does a great job explaining
`many of his tests upon which search is still largely based. Tom Evslin posted a blog entry
`about what it was like to work with Mr. Salton.
`Ted Nelson:
`Ted Nelson created Project Xanadu in 1960 and coined the term hypertext in 1963. His goal
`with Project Xanadu was to create a computer network with a simple user interface that
`solved many social problems like attribution.
`
`While Ted was against complex markup code, broken links, and many other problems
`associated with traditional HTML on the WWW, much of the inspiration to create the WWW
`was drawn from Ted's work.
`
`There is still conflict surrounding the exact reasons why Project Xanadu failed to take off.
`
`The Wikipedia offers background and many resource links about Mr. Nelson.
`Advanced Research Projects Agency Network:
`ARPANet is the network which eventually led to the internet. The Wikipedia has a great
`background article on ARPANet and Google Video has a free interesting video about
`ARPANet from 1972.
`Archie (1990):
`
`The first few hundred web sites began in 1993 and most of them were at colleges, but long
`before most of them existed came Archie. The first search engine created was Archie,
`created in 1990 by Alan Emtage, a student at McGill University in Montreal. The original
`intent of the name was "archives," but it was shortened to Archie.
`
`Archie helped solve this data scatter problem by combining a script-based data gatherer
`with a regular expression matcher for retrieving file names matching a user query.
`Essentially Archie became a database of web filenames which it would match with the
`users queries.
`
`Bill Slawski has more background on Archie here.
`Veronica & Jughead:
`As word of mouth about Archie spread, it started to become word of computer and Archie
`had such popularity that the University of Nevada System Computing Services group
`developed Veronica. Veronica served the same purpose as Archie, but it worked on plain
`text files. Soon another user interface name Jughead appeared with the same purpose as
`Veronica, both of these were used for files sent via Gopher, which was created as an Archie
`alternative by Mark McCahill at the University of Minnesota in 1991.
`File Transfer Protocol:
`Tim Burners-Lee existed at this point, however there was no World Wide Web. The main
`way people shared data back then was via File Transfer Protocol (FTP).
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`If you had a file you wanted to share you would set up an FTP server. If someone was
`interested in retrieving the data they could using an FTP client. This process worked
`effectively in small groups, but the data became as much fragmented as it was collected.
`Tim Berners-Lee & the WWW (1991):
`
`From the Wikipedia:
`
`While an independent contractor at CERN from June to December 1980, Berners-Lee
`proposed a project based on the concept of hypertext, to facilitate sharing and
`updating information among researchers. With help from Robert Cailliau he built a
`prototype system named Enquire.
`
`After leaving CERN in 1980 to work at John Poole's Image Computer Systems Ltd., he
`returned in 1984 as a fellow. In 1989, CERN was the largest Internet node in Europe,
`and Berners-Lee saw an opportunity to join hypertext with the Internet. In his words, "I
`just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to the TCP and DNS ideas and — ta-
`da! — the World Wide Web". He used similar ideas to those underlying the Enquire
`system to create the World Wide Web, for which he designed and built the first web
`browser and editor (called WorldWideWeb and developed on NeXTSTEP) and the first
`Web server called httpd (short for HyperText Transfer Protocol daemon).
`
`The first Web site built was at http://info.cern.ch/ and was first put online on August 6,
`1991. It provided an explanation about what the World Wide Web was, how one could
`own a browser and how to set up a Web server. It was also the world's first Web
`directory, since Berners-Lee maintained a list of other Web sites apart from his own.
`
`In 1994, Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at the
`Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
`
`Tim also created the Virtual Library, which is the oldest catalogue of the web. Tim also
`wrote a book about creating the web, titled Weaving the Web.
`What is a Bot?
`
`Computer robots are simply programs that automate repetitive tasks at speeds impossible
`for humans to reproduce. The term bot on the internet is usually used to describe anything
`that interfaces with the user or that collects data.
`
`Search engines use "spiders" which search (or spider) the web for information. They are
`software programs which request pages much like regular browsers do. In addition to
`reading the contents of pages for indexing spiders also record links.
`
`Link citations can be used as a proxy for editorial trust.
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`Link anchor text may help describe what a page is about.
`Link co citation data may be used to help determine what topical communities a page
`or website exist in.
`Additionally links are stored to help search engines discover new documents to later
`crawl.
`Another bot example could be Chatterbots, which are resource heavy on a specific topic.
`These bots attempt to act like a human and communicate with humans on said topic.
`Parts of a Search Engine:
`Search engines consist of 3 main parts. Search engine spiders follow links on the web to
`request pages that are either not yet indexed or have been updated since they were last
`indexed. These pages are crawled and are added to the search engine index (also known
`as the catalog). When you search using a major search engine you are not actually
`searching the web, but are searching a slightly outdated index of content which roughly
`represents the content of the web. The third part of a search engine is the search interface
`and relevancy software. For each search query search engines typically do most or all of
`the following
`
`Accept the user inputted query, checking to match any advanced syntax and checking
`to see if the query is misspelled to recommend more popular or correct spelling
`variations.
`Check to see if the query is relevant to other vertical search databases (such as news
`search or product search) and place relevant links to a few items from that type of
`search query near the regular search results.
`Gather a list of relevant pages for the organic search results. These results are ranked
`based on page content, usage data, and link citation data.
`Request a list of relevant ads to place near the search results.
`Searchers generally tend to click mostly on the top few search results, as noted in this
`article by Jakob Nielsen, and backed up by this search result eye tracking study.
`Want to learn more about how search engines work?
`In How does Google collect and rank results? Google engineer Matt Cutts briefly
`discusses how Google works.
`Google engineer Jeff Dean lectures a University of Washington class on how a search
`query at Google works in this video.
`The Chicago Tribune ran a special piece titled Gunning for Google, including around a
`dozen audio interviews, 3 columns, and this graphic about how Google works.
`How Stuff Works covers search engines in How Internet Search Engines Work.
`Types of Search Queries:
`Andrei Broder authored A Taxonomy of Web Search [PDF], which notes that most searches
`fall into the following 3 categories:
`
`Informational - seeking static information about a topic
`Transactional - shopping at, downloading from, or otherwise interacting with the result
`Navigational - send me to a specific URL
`Improve Your Searching Skills:
`Want to become a better searcher? Most large scale search engines offer:
`Advanced search pages which help searchers refine their queries to request files
`which are newer or older, local or in nature, from specific domains, published in specific
`formats, or other ways of refining search, for example the ~ character means related to
`Google.
`Vertical search databases which may help structure the information index or limit the
`search index to a more trusted or better structured collection of sources, documents,
`and information.
`Nancy Blachman's Google Guide offers searchers free Google search tips, and Greg
`R.Notess's Search Engine Showdown offers a search engine features chart.
`
`There are also many popular smaller vertical search services. For example, Del.icio.us
`allows you to search URLs that users have bookmarked, and Technorati allows you to
`search blogs.
`World Wide Web Wanderer:
`Soon the web's first robot came. In June 1993 Matthew Gray introduced the World Wide
`Web Wanderer. He initially wanted to measure the growth of the web and created this bot to
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`count active web servers. He soon upgraded the bot to capture actual URL's. His database
`became knows as the Wandex.
`
`The Wanderer was as much of a problem as it was a solution because it caused system lag
`by accessing the same page hundreds of times a day. It did not take long for him to fix this
`software, but people started to question the value of bots.
`ALIWEB:
`In October of 1993 Martijn Koster created Archie-Like Indexing of the Web, or ALIWEB in
`response to the Wanderer. ALIWEB crawled meta information and allowed users to submit
`their pages they wanted indexed with their own page description. This meant it needed no
`bot to collect data and was not using excessive bandwidth. The downside of ALIWEB is that
`many people did not know how to submit their site.
`Robots Exclusion Standard:
`Martijn Kojer also hosts the web robots page, which created standards for how search
`engines should index or not index content. This allows webmasters to block bots from their
`site on a whole site level or page by page basis.
`
`By default, if information is on a public web server, and people link to it search engines
`generally will index it.
`
`In 2005 Google led a crusade against blog comment spam, creating a nofollow attribute
`that can be applied at the individual link level. After this was pushed through Google quickly
`changed the scope of the purpose of the link nofollow to claim it was for any link that was
`sold or not under editorial control.
`Primitive Web Search:
`By December of 1993, three full fledged bot fed search engines had surfaced on the web:
`JumpStation, the World Wide Web Worm, and the Repository-Based Software Engineering
`(RBSE) spider. JumpStation gathered info about the title and header from Web pages and
`retrieved these using a simple linear search. As the web grew, JumpStation slowed to a
`stop. The WWW Worm indexed titles and URL's. The problem with JumpStation and the
`World Wide Web Worm is that they listed results in the order that they found them, and
`provided no discrimination. The RSBE spider did implement a ranking system.
`
`Since early search algorithms did not do adequate link analysis or cache full page content if
`you did not know the exact name of what you were looking for it was extremely hard to find
`it.
`Excite:
`
`Excite came from the project Architext, which was started by in February, 1993 by six
`Stanford undergrad students. They had the idea of using statistical analysis of word
`relationships to make searching more efficient. They were soon funded, and in mid 1993
`they released copies of their search software for use on web sites.
`
`Excite was bought by a broadband provider named @Home in January, 1999 for $6.5
`billion, and was named Excite@Home. In October, 2001 Excite@Home filed for bankruptcy.
`InfoSpace bought Excite from bankruptcy court for $10 million.
`Web Directories:
`VLib:
`
`When Tim Berners-Lee set up the web he created the Virtual Library, which
`became a loose confederation of topical experts maintaining relevant topical link
`lists.
`
`
`
`EINet Galaxy
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`The EINet Galaxy web directory was born in January of 1994. It was organized similar to
`how web directories are today. The biggest reason the EINet Galaxy became a success
`was that it also contained Gopher and Telnet search features in addition to its web search
`feature. The web size in early 1994 did not really require a web directory; however, other
`directories soon did follow.
`
`Yahoo! Directory
`
`In April 1994 David Filo and Jerry Yang created the Yahoo! Directory as a collection of their
`favorite web pages. As their number of links grew they had to reorganize and become a
`searchable directory. What set the directories above The Wanderer is that they provided a
`human compiled description with each URL. As time passed and the Yahoo! Directory grew
`Yahoo! began charging commercial sites for inclusion. As time passed the inclusion rates
`for listing a commercial site increased. The current cost is $299 per year. Many
`informational sites are still added to the Yahoo! Directory for free.
`
`On September 26, 2014, Yahoo! announced they would close the Yahoo! Directory at the
`end of 2014, though it was transitioned to being part of Yahoo! Small Business and
`remained online at business.yahoo.com.
`
`Open Directory Project
`
`In 1998 Rich Skrenta and a small group of friends created the Open Directory Project,
`which is a directory which anybody can download and use in whole or part. The ODP (also
`known as DMOZ) is the largest internet directory, almost entirely ran by a group of volunteer
`editors. The Open Directory Project was grown out of frustration webmasters faced waiting
`to be included in the Yahoo! Directory. Netscape bought the Open Directory Project in
`November, 1998. Later that same month AOL announced the intention of buying Netscape
`in a $4.5 billion all stock deal.
`
`DMOZ closed on March 17, 2017. When the directory shut down it had 3,861,210 active
`listings in 90 languages. Numerous online mirrors of the directory have been published at
`DMOZtools.net, ODP.org & other locations.
`
`LII
`
`Google offers a librarian newsletter to help librarians and other web editors help make
`information more accessible and categorize the web. The second Google librarian
`newsletter came from Karen G. Schneider, who was the director of Librarians' Internet
`Index. LII was a high quality directory aimed at librarians. Her article explains what she and
`her staff look for when looking for quality credible resources to add to the LII. Most other
`directories, especially those which have a paid inclusion option, hold lower standards than
`selected limited catalogs created by librarians.
`
`The LII was later merged into the Internet Public Library, which was another well kept
`directory of websites that went into archive-only mode after 20 years of service.
`
`Business.com
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`Due to the time intensive nature of running a directory, and the general lack of scalability of
`a business model the quality and size of directories sharply drops off after you get past the
`first half dozen or so general directories. There are also numerous smaller industry,
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`vertically, or locally oriented directories. Business.com, for example, is a directory of
`business websites.
`
`Business.com was a high-profile purchase for local directory company R.H. Donnelley.
`Unfortunately that $345 milion deal on July 26, 2007 only accelerated the bankruptcy of
`R.H. Donnelley, which let them to sell the Business.com directory to Resource Nation in
`February of 2011. The Google Panda algorithm hit Business.com, which made it virtually
`impossible for the site to maintain a strong cashflow based on organic search rankings.
`Business.com was once again sold in June of 2016 to the Purch Group.
`
`Looksmart
`
`Looksmart was founded in 1995. They competed with the Yahoo! Directory by frequently
`increasing their inclusion rates back and forth. In 2002 Looksmart transitioned into a pay
`per click provider, which charged listed sites a flat fee per click. That caused the demise of
`any good faith or loyalty they had built up, although it allowed them to profit by syndicating
`those paid listings to some major portals like MSN. The problem was that Looksmart
`became too dependant on MSN, and in 2003, when Microsoft announced they were
`dumping Looksmart that basically killed their business model.
`
`In March of 2002, Looksmart bought a search engine by the name of WiseNut, but it never
`gained traction. Looksmart also owns a catalog of content articles organized in vertical
`sites, but due to limited relevancy Looksmart has lost most (if not all) of their momentum. In
`1998 Looksmart tried to expand their directory by buying the non commercial Zeal directory
`for $20 million, but on March 28, 2006 Looksmart shut down the Zeal directory, and hope to
`drive traffic using Furl, a social bookmarking program.
`Search Engines vs Directories:
`All major search engines have some limited editorial review process, but the bulk of
`relevancy at major search engines is driven by automated search algorithms which harness
`the power of the link graph on the web. In fact, some algorithms, such as TrustRank, bias
`the web graph toward trusted seed sites without requiring a search engine to take on much
`of an editorial review staff. Thus, some of the more elegant search engines allow those who
`link to other sites to in essence vote with their links as the editorial reviewers.
`
`Unlike highly automated search engines, directories are manually compiled taxonomies of
`websites. Directories are far more cost and time intensive to maintain due to their lack of
`scalability and the necessary human input to create each listing and periodically check the
`quality of the listed websites.
`
`General directories are largely giving way to expert vertical directories, temporal news sites
`(like blogs), and social bookmarking sites (like del.ici.ous). In addition, each of those three
`publishing formats I just mentioned also aid in improving the relevancy of major search
`engines, which further cuts at the need for (and profitability of) general directories.
`
`Here is a great background video on the history of search.
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`The future of search: Marcus Tandler at TEDxMünchen
`
`WebCrawler:
`
`Brian Pinkerton of the University of Washington released WebCrawler on April 20, 1994. It
`was the first crawler which indexed entire pages. Soon it became so popular that during
`daytime hours it could not be used. AOL eventually purchased WebCrawler and ran it on
`their network. Then in 1997, Excite bought out WebCrawler, and AOL began using Excite to
`power its NetFind. WebCrawler opened the door for many other services to follow suit.
`Within 1 year of its debuted came Lycos, Infoseek, and OpenText.
`Lycos:
`
`Lycos was the next major search development, having been design at Carnegie Mellon
`University around July of 1994. Michale Mauldin was responsible for this search engine and
`remains to be the chief scientist at Lycos Inc.
`
`On July 20, 1994, Lycos went public with a catalog of 54,000 documents. In addition to
`providing ranked relevance retrieval, Lycos provided prefix matching and word proximity
`bonuses. But Lycos' main difference was the sheer size of its catalog: by August 1994,
`Lycos had identified 394,000 documents; by January 1995, the catalog had reached 1.5
`million documents; and by November 1996, Lycos had indexed over 60 million documents -
`- more than any other Web search engine. In October 1994, Lycos ranked first on
`Netscape's list of search engines by finding the most hits on the word ‘surf.’.
`Infoseek:
`Infoseek also started out in 1994, claiming to have been founded in January. They really did
`not bring a whole lot of innovation to the table, but they offered a few add on's, and in
`December 1995 they convinced Netscape to use them as their default search, which gave
`them major exposure. One popular feature of Infoseek was allowing webmasters to submit
`a page to the search index in real time, which was a search spammer's paradise.
`AltaVista:
`
`AltaVista debut online came during this same month.
`AltaVista brought many important features to the web
`scene. They had nearly unlimited bandwidth (for that
`time), they were the first to allow natural language
`queries, advanced searching techniques and they
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`allowed users to add or delete their own URL within 24 hours. They even allowed inbound
`link checking. AltaVista also provided numerous search tips and advanced search features.
`
`Due to poor mismanagement, a fear of result manipulation, and portal related clutter
`AltaVista was largely driven into irrelevancy around the time Inktomi and Google started
`becoming popular. On February 18, 2003, Overture signed a letter of intent to buy AltaVista
`for $80 million in stock and $60 million cash. After Yahoo! bought out Overture they rolled
`some of the AltaVista technology into Yahoo! Search, and occasionally use AltaVista as a
`testing platform.
`Inktomi:
`
`The Inktomi Corporation came about on May 20, 1996 with its search
`engine Hotbot. Two Cal Berkeley cohorts created Inktomi from the
`improved technology gained from their research. Hotwire listed this site
`and it became hugely popular quickly.
`
`In October of 2001 Danny Sullivan wrote an article titled Inktomi Spam Database Left Open
`To Public, which highlights how Inktomi accidentally allowed the public to access their
`database of spam sites, which listed over 1 million URLs at that time.
`
`Although Inktomi pioneered the paid inclusion model it was nowhere near as efficient as the
`pay per click auction model developed by Overture. Licensing their search results also was
`not profitable enough to pay for their scaling costs. They failed to develop a profitable
`business model, and sold out to Yahoo! for approximately $235 million, or $1.65 a share, in
`December of 2003.
`Ask.com (Formerly Ask Jeeves):
`
`In April of 1997 Ask Jeeves was launched as a
`natural language search engine. Ask Jeeves used
`human editors to try to match search queries. Ask
`was powered by DirectHit for a while, which
`aimed to rank results based on their popularity,
`but that technology proved to easy to spam as the
`core algorithm component. In 2000 the Teoma
`search engine was released, which uses
`clustering to organize sites by Subject Specific
`Popularity, which is another way of saying they
`tried to find local web communities. In 2001 Ask
`Jeeves bought Teoma to replace the DirectHit
`search technology.
`
`Jon Kleinberg's Authoritative sources in a
`hyperlinked environment [PDF] was a source of inspiration what lead to the eventual
`creation of Teoma. Mike Grehan's Topic Distillation [PDF] also explains how subject specific
`popularity works.
`
`On Mar 4, 2004, Ask Jeeves agreed to acquire Interactive Search Holdings for 9.3 million
`shares of common stock and options and pay $150 million in cash. On March 21, 2005
`Barry Diller's IAC agreed to acquire Ask Jeeves for 1.85 billion dollars. IAC owns many
`popular websites like Match.com, Ticketmaster.com, and Citysearch.com, and is promoting
`Ask across their other properties. In 2006 Ask Jeeves was renamed to Ask, and they killed
`the separate Teoma brand.
`AllTheWeb
`
`AllTheWeb was a search technology platform launched in May of 1999 to showcase Fast's
`search technologies. They had a sleek user interface with rich advanced search features,
`but on February 23, 2003, AllTheWeb was bought by Overture for $70 million. After Yahoo!
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`bought out Overture they rolled some of the AllTheWeb technology into Yahoo! Search, and
`occasionally use AllTheWeb as a testing platform.
`Meta Search Engines
`Most meta search engines draw their search results from multiple other search engines,
`then combine and rerank those results. This was a useful feature back when search
`engines were less savvy at crawling the web and each engine had a significantly unique
`index. As search has improved the need for meta search engines has been reduced.
`
`Hotbot was owned by Wired, had funky colors, fast results, and a cool name that sounded
`geeky, but died off not long after Lycos bought it and ignored it. Upon rebirth it was born as
`a meta search engine. Unlike most meta search engines, Hotbot only pulls results from one
`search engine at a time, but it allows searchers to select amongst a few of the more popular
`search engines on the web. Currently Dogpile, owned by Infospace, is probably the most
`popular meta search engine on the market, but like all other meta search engines, it has
`limited market share.
`
`One of the larger problems with meta search in general is that most meta search engines
`tend to mix pay per click ads in their organic search results, and for some commercial
`queries 70% or more of the search results may be paid results. I also created Myriad
`Search, which is a free open source meta search engine without ads.
`Vertical Search
`The major search engines are fighting for content and marketshare in verticals outside
`of the core algorithmic search product. For example, both Yahoo and MSN have
`question answering services where humans answer each other's questions for free. Google
`has a similar offering, but question answerers are paid for their work.
`
`Google, Yahoo, and MSN are also fighting to become the default video platform on the web,
`which is a vertical where an upstart named YouTube also has a strong position.
`
`Yahoo and Microsoft are aligned on book search in a group called the Open Content
`Alliance. Google, going it alone in that vertical, offers a proprietary Google Book search.
`
`All three major search engines provide a news search service. Yahoo! has partnered with
`some premium providers to allow subscribers to include that content in their news search
`results. Google has partnered with the AP and a number of other news sources to extend
`their news database back over 200 years. And Topix.net is a popular news service which
`sold 75% of its ownership to 3 of the largest newspaper companies. Thousands of weblogs
`are updated daily reporting the news, some of which are competing with (and beating out)
`the mainstream media. If that were not enough options for news, social bookmarking sites
`like Del.icio.us frequently update recently popular lists, there are meme trackers like
`Techmeme that track the spread of stories through blogs, and sites like Digg allow their
`users to directly vote on how much exposure each item gets.
`
`Google also has a Scholar search program which aims to make scholarly research easier to
`do.
`
`In some verticals, like shopping search, other third party players may have significant
`marketshare, gained through offline distribution and branding (for example, yellow pages
`companies), or gained largely through arbitraging traffic streams from the major search
`engines.
`
`On November 15, 2005 Google launched a product called Google Base, which is a
`database of just about anything imaginable. Users can upload items and title, describe, and
`tag them as they see fit. Based on usage statistics this tool can help Google understand
`which vertical search products they should create or place more emphasis on. They believe
`that owning other verticals will allow them to drive more traffic back to their core search
`service. They also believe that targeted measured advertising associated with search can
`be carried over to other mediums. For example, Google bought dMarc, a radio ad
`placement firm. Yahoo! has also tried to extend their reach by buying other high traffic
`properties, like the photo sharing site Flickr, and the social bookmarking site del.icio.us.
`
`http://www.searchenginehistory.com/
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`5/14/2018
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`Search Engine History.com
`After a couple years of testing, on May 5th, 2010 Google unveiled a 3 column search result
`layout which highlights many vertical search options in the left rail.
`
`Google shut down their financial services comparison search tool Google Comparison on
`March 23, 2016. Google has continued to grow their Product Listing Ads, local inventory
`ads & hotel ads while shedding many other vertical search functions. When Google shut
`down their financial comparison search tool they shifted from showing a maximum of 3 ads
`at the top of the search results to showing a maximum of 4 ads above the organic search
`results.
`Search & The Mobile Web
`By 2015 mobile accounted for more than half of digital ad spending. The online ad market is
`growing increasingly consolidated with Google & Facebook eating almost all of the growth.
`
`Google's dominance over desktop search is only increased on mobile, as Google pays
`Apple to be the default search provider in iOS & Android's secret contracts bundled Google
`as the default search option.
`
`Google settled an Android antitrust case in Russia & is being investigated in Europe.
`
`Due to the increasing importance of mobile Google shifted to showing search results in a
`single column on desktop computers, with the exceptions of som