Google, MSN and Yahoo! – Who’s the greatest Search Engine?

Since the creation of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners Lee in 1990, the internet has been largely used to store and exchange information in the form of documents, sound files and video. More and more people started using the internet to share and store information because it was easy to do and the speed of communication was incredible; letters and documents that previously took days to reach their recipients could be delivered in minutes. With this increased usage came a surge in information clutter, meaning the documents, although easily retrievable were not easily accessible.

This led to the birth of the very first internet searching tool, Archie, created by Alan Emtage. The name was derived not from the children’s comic book but from the word “Archive” without the “v”. Archie was the very first official search engine on the web and worked by downloading the directory listings of all files located on anonymous public FTP (File Transfer Protocol) sites and creating a searchable database of the filenames. Archie revolutionized people’s use of the interent. Allowing them to easily find a single file in amongst the thousands that were available. But Archie’s technology had a major drawback in that it consumed large amounts of bandwidth whilst collecting the information and because the WWW was growing so rapidly, Archie had trouble keeping pace with it’s expansion. This vulnerability led to the further modification of the search technology and a slew of new and improved search engine.

In 1994, Jerry Yang and David Filo created Yahoo!. Yahoo! started as a directory (which still exists today), listing their favorite websites. What set Yahoo! apart from the rest was the availability of a short description of each page attached with their URLs. This unique feature helped to set Yahoo! apart from it’s competition and helped the duo receive funding within two years; Yahoo! Corporation was born. After the formation of the Yahoo! Corporation, many other search engines and directories looked to improve their results by following in Yahoo!’s footsteps; Lycos, Alta Vista and Ask Jeeves (now ASK) to name but a few.

None of these search engines, however, despite their efforts were prepared for the first Giant of Search - Google. Founded in 1997 by two students of the Stanford University, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Google was created as part of their research project and, unlike previous search engines, put less emphasis on the textual content of the page and more on it’s perceived popularity within the World wide Web. This unique feature of analysing inbound links to a website helped Google produce more relevant search results compared to it’s competitors, helping it to earn a sizeable market share relatively quickly. It was Google’s rapid rise that, some say, encouraged a world’s largest software company, Microsoft, to enter the search engine arena with MSN in 1998.

Over the years, competition increased amongst all sectors of the internet and the search engines were no exception. This cut-throat competition pushed the smaller directories and engines further and further behind as the more successful companies continually reinvested their profits in order to improve their search engine algorithms and gain valuable market share. By the end of the decade, the search engine market was dominated by three major players, MSN, Yahoo! and Google.

All three engines believed that the quality of search results was paramount to their success and all made a series of improvements over the early years of the new millennium to improve the quality of the sites returned for a search query. However by the time of the dot-com bubble burst, it was Google who had differentiated themselves sufficiently so that they controlled the lion’s share of the search market, with Yahoo! and MSN increasingly being dismissed as nothing more than news portals and directory sites.

Now several years on, Google has managed to retain its lead over it’s main rivals Yahoo! and MSN whilst simultaneously fending off new search rivals such as PowerSet.

For part 2 of this article see: Search Engines - The Main Players

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