Say search engine and Google comes to mind, but the truth is it was not like that in the early days. Plenty of search engines opened before Google and after it. Each had a philosophy of its own when it launched, and in this article at Türk SEM we will go through the timelines of the significant moments in the search engines that have opened from the beginning until now.

Join in: if there is a search engine you want added to the timeline, tell us in the comments.

A Chronology of Search Engines

  • 1990 – Archie: taken as the first search engine. Used to index FTP sites.
  • 1991 – Gopher: a text based system for searching and viewing content, developed at the University of Minnesota.
  • 1993 – W3Catalog: one of the first search engines for the World Wide Web.
  • 1993 – Aliweb: the first web indexing search engine.
  • 1994 – WebCrawler: the first search engine able to search full text.
  • 1994 – Lycos: developed at Carnegie Mellon University and popular very quickly.
  • 1995 – AltaVista: built by Digital Equipment Corporation, the most advanced search engine of its day.
  • 1995 – Excite: a search engine and web portal founded by six Stanford students.
  • 1996 – Inktomi: search technology developed at Berkeley and used by Yahoo!.
  • 1996 – HotBot: a search engine launched by Wired Magazine, running on Inktomi technology.
  • 1997 – Ask Jeeves (now Ask.com): a search engine designed for natural language queries.
  • 1997 – Google: developed at Stanford by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, using the PageRank algorithm.
  • 1998 – Open Directory Project (DMOZ): a human edited web directory project.
  • 1998 – MSN Search: Microsoft’s first go at a search engine (later to become Bing).
  • 2000 – Baidu: the platform that would become the largest search engine in China was founded.
  • 2000 – Google AdWords: Google’s advertising platform launched.
  • 2002 – Google News: automated news gathering and indexing went live.
  • 2003 – Google AdSense: an advertising platform for content publishers launched.
  • 2004 – Google Scholar: a dedicated search engine for academic publications launched.
  • 2004 – Google Books: the project to scan the contents of books began.
  • 2005 – Google Maps: search across maps and satellite imagery launched.
  • 2006 – Wikia Search: an open source search engine project started by Jimmy Wales (it ended in 2009).
  • 2008 – Cuil: a short lived search engine founded by former Google engineers.
  • 2009 – Site Ekle: a Turkish language search engine built by Tahir Dinç, one of the founders of Türk SEM.
  • 2009 – Microsoft Bing: Microsoft’s next generation search engine launched.
  • 2009 – Wolfram Alpha: a new kind of search platform, presented as a computational knowledge engine.
  • 2010 – Google Instant: a search feature showing results in real time as the user types.
  • 2011 – Google Panda: an algorithm update that put content quality to the front.
  • 2012 – Google Knowledge Graph: semantic information added to the search results.
  • 2013 – Google Hummingbird: a major algorithm update improving natural language processing and semantic search.
  • 2015 – Google RankBrain: an AI based learning system built into the search algorithm.
  • 2016 – Google Possum: an algorithm update affecting local search.
  • 2017 – Google Lens: visual search and recognition technology introduced.
  • 2018 – Bing and Google widen their AI powered search features.
  • 2019 – BERT: Google builds its natural language processing model into search.
  • 2020 – GPT-3: discussion begins on how OpenAI’s language model might be used in search and content production.
  • 2021 – MUM (Multitask Unified Model): Google introduces its multilingual, multitask understanding model.
  • 2022 – Google begins testing its AI powered “Multisearch” feature.
  • 2023 – work on building ChatGPT and similar large language models into search engines accelerates.

Note: to see the significant moments at Google, have a look at our piece on Google year by year.

You can also read about DMOZ, where I was an editor in 2004.