Search Engines: A Constantly Evolving Business Tool

It is hard to comprehend of a time before search engines. How did one search for things online? How did users navigate? As strange as it might sound, it all started with a list.

This list from 1992, contained all web-servers that were online at that time, the birth of the Internet. This list, whilst pitiful when compared to the behemoth that the Internet is today, was edited by Tim Berners-Lee and hosted on the CERN website. It is an almost quaint reminder of a time before the likes of Google, Yahoo and Altavista. Click here for the list.

As the 'Net grew and grew, more and more web-servers went online and the list quickly became redundant. Instead, on the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) site, new servers were announced under a 'What's New!' banner.

Internet searching tools were the next logical evolution; in the early 90s, the likes of AliWeb appeared, but were often limited in that they depended on being notified by website administrators of a site's existence and of it being in a particular format.

The next step in search engines were the "full text" crawler-based search engines such as WebCrawler. Appearing online in 1994, it let users search for any word in any webpage, which has become the standard for all major search engines since.

It started a trend that has grown exponentially with the likes of Lycos, Infoseek and Yahoo taking the lead.

It was Google however, that was to become king. Rising to prominence at the turn of the millennium, Google gave users better results by using a system called PageRank. The system ranked web pages based on the number of other web sites and pages that link there, on the idea that good or frequently visited pages would be linked to others.

Whilst the general search algorithms have grown more advanced, they have more or less retained the same premise, it is the next evolution of search engines that the likes of Google are interested in; real-time web.

Enabling users to find information online as soon as it is produced, real-time web is the result of an Internet increasingly dominated by real-time social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook.

Whereas traditional web searches list web pages periodically, based on subject relevance and popularity, real time web delivers topics that have been discussed most recently. The content is often classed as "soft" in that it is, more often than not, based on people's opinions, attitudes, thoughts and interests. "Hard" topics would be classified as news or factual sites.

This live form of online searching was personified perfectly last night, when Google Mail crashed. Within minutes, over 4,000 Twitter comments were posted on Twitter Search regarding the problem. If you'd had typed Google Mail into any other search engine, you'd have merely gotten links to the email site.

With more and more people demanding up to the minute information, it is a technology that many search engines are attempting to implement, but as of now it is dominated by Twitter explaining why many companies, politicians and celebrities have their own Twitter accounts.