The Heart

Rise of Search Engines

Once Archie was invented people followed after Emtage creating their own. Some of these engines included: Google, Ask Jeeves, and Yahoo!. However, the one that would eventually take over was Google, founded in 1996 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

Google

Google was founded in 1996, by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Google is currently the search engine with the most world-wide usage. As of June 2023, it has a 90.68% global market share. One of the key reasons for Google's success is its algorithm "PageRank." A secondary reason for Google's success was the wide platform it developed. Google has its browser "Chrome," Google Docs, Slides, Sheets and, Drive, plus even more resources that are all connected. 

Google's success is shown by the fact it is even in the dictionary!

Business Insider, "33 photos of Google's rise from a Stanford dorm room to world domination," October 10th, 2016

Business Insider, "Here's What Google Looked Like The First Day It Launched In 1998," September 27, 2013, Alyson Shontell

"Everybody thinks of Google as being the search engine, but Google’s genius was to harness human knowledge and use that to provide more relevant results. So, the PageRank algorithm, which basically defines what Google is...Humans are the ones that are sending out those links, so it harnessed human decision-making in their results, and that’s what makes Google kind of look like magic."

~ Alan Emtage, November 28th, 2017, AN INTERVIEW WITH ALAN EMTAGE

Ask Jeeves

Ask Jeeves was founded in 1995, by Garrett Gruener and David Warthen. Ask Jeeves was an old engine that was very popular with beginners. One of the main reason it was popular with begineers is, Ask Jeeves allowed users to search things up using normal sentences instead of keywords. Ask Jeeves popularized this format making it key in the history of search engines. While it still exists it is much different today.

History Computer, The Real Reason Ask Jeeves Failed Spectacularly, August 10th 2023, Nate Willams

Indiana Gazette, Searching the Internet trying for beginners, October 17th 1999, Virginia Filler

Yahoo!

Yahoo! was the most popular engine at one time. It was founded in 1995 by Jerry Yang and David Filo. Yahoo! had a wide variety of things it included that made it popular, such as games and emails. Yahoo! is still active but is not as big as it used to be. 

History Computer, Yahoo – History, Origin and More., July 26 2023, Dana Mayor

Jerry Yang and David Filo

In 1998, AltaVista, the company that owns Yahoo!, had the chance to buy PageRank which is the algorithm Google runs on, for one million dollars. Later in 2002, Yahoo! tried to buy Google again for three billion, but Google refused setting its price at five billion. Yahoo! backs out and never ends up buying Google. 

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