The Families · Search engine history
The history of search engines. Every family that ever ran search.
From a 1945 essay and Archie in 1990 to ChatGPT and AI Mode. The search engine timeline: who ruled, who got bought out, who got whacked, and who is still standing. Every date sourced.
Search engine history at a glance
93 moments, 1945 to 2026
Last updated by Peter Roesler.
The record
The search engine timeline. Every rise, every fall.
Filter by who made it and who did not. Google gets the short version here. Its updates have their own record on The Hits.
Search engine history, 1945 to 1989Before the Web
An essay about a magic desk, a professor at Cornell, and the ideas every search engine still runs on.
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1945Imagined
The Dream
As We May Think (1945)
July 1945
Vannevar Bush published the essay in The Atlantic Monthly and described the memex, a desk that would store a person's books and records on microfilm. Items would be linked into named trails by association instead of filed in a fixed index.
Source: Wikipedia: As We May Think
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1960sInvented
The Professor
SMART at Cornell (1960)
1960s
Gerard Salton led the SMART information retrieval system at Cornell University in the 1960s. Research on it advanced the vector space model and relevance feedback, which are still core ideas in search.
Search engine history, 1990 to 1997The Old Country
Before Google. Directories, robots and a butler fighting over a web nobody had mapped yet.
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1990Opened shop
The Grandfather
Archie (1990)
September 10, 1990
Alan Emtage, a student at McGill University in Montreal, released Archie to index the file names on public FTP servers. It is often called the first internet search engine, though it never looked inside the files.
Source: Wikipedia: Archie
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1991Opened shop
The Cousins
Veronica and Jughead (1991)
1991
Two tools appeared that searched the menu titles of Gopher servers, the text menu system that briefly rivaled the web.
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1991Went live
Day One
The first website (1991)
August 6, 1991
Tim Berners Lee and his team at CERN put the first website online at info.cern.ch in December 1990. In August 1991 the web was published to the wider internet.
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1991Opened shop
The Card Catalog
WWW Virtual Library (1991)
1991
Tim Berners Lee started the World Wide Web Virtual Library at CERN in 1991. It was a catalog of the web organized by subject, built by hand.
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1993Opened shop
The First Ledger
W3Catalog (1993)
September 2, 1993
Oscar Nierstrasz at the University of Geneva launched W3Catalog, often cited as the first web search engine. It pulled from existing hand kept lists of sites instead of crawling.
Source: Wikipedia: W3Catalog
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1993Opened shop
Sign In at the Door
Aliweb (1993)
November 30, 1993
Martijn Koster announced Aliweb, which asked site owners to submit their own index files rather than sending out a robot.
Source: Wikipedia: Aliweb
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1993Opened shop
The First Crawler
World Wide Web Wanderer (1993)
June 1993
Matthew Gray at MIT deployed the Wanderer in June 1993, a crawler written to measure the size of the web. Later that year its crawl produced an index called Wandex.
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1993Whacked
First Through the Door
JumpStation (1993)
December 12, 1993
Jonathon Fletcher at the University of Stirling began indexing on December 12, 1993, and JumpStation was announced on December 21. It used a robot to build its index and a keyword form to search it, but it did not rank results, and it closed in 1994 after Fletcher could not find funding.
Source: Wikipedia: JumpStation
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1994Opened shop
The Front Door
Yahoo Directory (1994)
January 1994
Two Stanford students started a hand built list called Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web. It grew into the Yahoo Directory, the front door of the early web.
Source: Wikipedia: Yahoo Directory
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1994Opened shop
Pay to Play
Infoseek (1994)
January 1994
Infoseek launched, first as a pay for use search service.
Source: Wikipedia: Infoseek
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1994Opened shop
Every Word on the Page
WebCrawler (1994)
April 20, 1994
WebCrawler went live as the first web search engine to offer full text search, letting people find any word on any page it had indexed.
Source: Wikipedia: WebCrawler
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1994Opened shop
The Retriever
Lycos (1994)
July 1994
Lycos was released as a research project at Carnegie Mellon University and became a company in 1995.
Sources: Wikipedia: Lycos, Wikipedia: Timeline of web search engines
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1995Bought out
The First Buyout
AOL buys WebCrawler (1995)
June 1, 1995
America Online bought WebCrawler. Excite then bought it from AOL on April 1, 1997 for $12.3 million.
Source: Wikipedia: WebCrawler
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1995Opened shop
The Portal
Excite (1995)
October 1995
Excite launched, having started in 1993 as a company called Architext.
Source: Wikipedia: Excite
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1995Moving up
The Old Boss
AltaVista (1995)
December 15, 1995
AltaVista launched in Palo Alto with a huge full text index and support for plain language queries. It became one of the most used search engines of the late 1990s.
Sources: Wikipedia: AltaVista, Salon
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1996Opened shop
The Hired Muscle
HotBot and Inktomi (1996)
May 27, 1996
HotWired, the online arm of Wired magazine, launched HotBot on technology from Inktomi, a Berkeley startup founded in January 1996.
Sources: Wikipedia: HotBot, Wikipedia: Inktomi
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1996Opened shop
The Out of Towners
LookSmart (1996)
October 28, 1996
LookSmart, a directory founded in Melbourne, Australia, launched with more than 85,000 sites. It later supplied listings to MSN until Microsoft dropped it in 2004.
Source: Wikipedia: LookSmart
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1996Still standing
Everybody at Once
Dogpile (1996)
November 1996
Aaron Flin launched Dogpile, a metasearch engine that sends each query to several other engines at once.
Source: Wikipedia: Dogpile
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1996Bought out
The Explorer
Magellan (1996)
June 1996
Magellan was an early web directory with reviews of sites, run by the McKinley Group. Excite bought it by June 1996 for about $18 million in stock plus debt, and shut it down in May 2001.
Source: Wikipedia: Excite
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1996Moving up
The Back Room
BackRub (1996)
1996 · A Google moment
Larry Page and Sergey Brin started BackRub at Stanford in 1996, a search project that ranked pages by the links pointing to them. It ran on Stanford servers and became Google, whose domain google.com was registered on September 15, 1997.
Source: Wikipedia: History of Google
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1996Opened shop
The Blueprint
RankDex (1996)
1996
Robin Li built RankDex in 1996 at IDD Information Services, a Dow Jones unit, ranking sites by how many other sites linked to them. He patented the method, and later used it in Baidu, which he cofounded in 2000.
Source: Wikipedia: RankDex
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1997Opened shop
The Butler
Ask Jeeves (1997)
June 1, 1997
Ask Jeeves fully launched after an April beta. Its butler mascot invited people to type questions in plain English.
Source: Wikipedia: Ask.com
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1997Opened shop
The Filing Cabinet
Northern Light (1997)
August 1997
Northern Light launched a search engine that sorted results into custom folders and mixed the web with a paid library of articles.
Source: Wikipedia: Northern Light Group
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1997Still standing
The Moscow Family
Yandex (1997)
September 23, 1997
Yandex was announced in Moscow and grew into the leading search engine in Russia.
Source: Wikipedia: Yandex Search
Search engine history, 1998 to 2009The Rise
Two Stanford grads open shop in a garage. Within ten years the rest of the families are paying them, selling out or getting out.
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1998Moving up
Pay for the Top Spot
GoTo.com (1998)
February 1998
GoTo.com introduced paid placement, letting advertisers bid for top spots and pay per click. Renamed Overture in October 2001, it set the model for search advertising.
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1998Opened shop
The Volunteers
DMOZ Open Directory (1998)
June 5, 1998
Engineers Rich Skrenta and Bob Truel launched a volunteer edited directory called GnuHoo, soon renamed NewHoo. Netscape bought it in October 1998 and renamed it the Open Directory Project.
Source: Wikipedia: DMOZ
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1998Still standing
The Garage
Google (1998)
September 4, 1998 · A Google moment
Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google in Menlo Park, building on a Stanford research project that began in 1996.
Sources: Wikipedia: Google, Wikipedia: Google Search
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1998Bought out
Taking Over the Muscle
Lycos buys HotBot (1998)
October 1998
Lycos got HotBot when it bought Wired's digital business and ran it alongside its own engine.
Source: Wikipedia: HotBot
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1998Published
The Manifesto
The Anatomy of a Search Engine (1998)
April 1998 · A Google moment
Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page presented The Anatomy of a Large Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine at the WWW7 conference in Brisbane in April 1998. The paper described the Google prototype and its use of link structure to rank results.
Source: Google Research
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1998Opened shop
Borrowed Muscle
MSN Search (1998)
1998
Microsoft launched MSN Search in the third quarter of 1998, using results from Inktomi rather than its own index. It later became Windows Live Search, then Live Search, and was replaced by Bing in June 2009.
Source: Wikipedia: Microsoft Bing
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1998Bought out
Follow the Clicks
Direct Hit (1998)
April 1998
Gary Culliss and Mike Cassidy founded Direct Hit in Boston in April 1998 to rank results by what searchers clicked and how long they stayed. Ask Jeeves completed its purchase of the company in February 2000 for about $500 million in stock.
Sources: Wikipedia: Direct Hit Technologies, Ask Jeeves SEC filing, 2000
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1999Bought out
The Mouse Moves In
Disney takes over Infoseek (1999)
July 1999
Disney, which had bought a 43 percent stake in 1998, bought the rest of Infoseek and folded it into its GO.com portal.
Source: Wikipedia: Infoseek
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1999Whacked
The Norwegian
AllTheWeb (1999)
1999
Fast Search and Transfer of Norway launched AllTheWeb in 1999. Overture bought it in 2003, Yahoo then bought Overture, and Yahoo shut the site down on April 4, 2011.
Source: Wikipedia: AlltheWeb
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2000Still standing
The Beijing Family
Baidu (2000)
January 18, 2000
Robin Li and Eric Xu founded Baidu, which became the dominant search engine in China.
Source: Wikipedia: Baidu
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2000Moving up
Letting the Kid In
Yahoo uses Google results (2000)
2000 · A Google moment
Yahoo began licensing Google's search results, putting the young engine in front of millions of Yahoo users.
Source: Wikipedia: Yahoo Search
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2000Bought out
Top of the Bubble
Terra buys Lycos (2000)
October 2000
Spain's Terra Networks bought Lycos in a stock deal valued at $12.5 billion at the peak of the dot com boom.
Source: Wikipedia: Lycos
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2000Moving up
The Family Business
Google AdWords (2000)
October 23, 2000 · A Google moment
Google launched AdWords, a self service program for buying keyword ads beside search results. It was renamed Google Ads in 2018.
Sources: Google press release, Wikipedia: Google Ads
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2001Whacked
Lights Out at the Mouse House
Infoseek shut down (2001)
February 2001
Disney decided to shut down the Infoseek service and lay off its staff. GO.com soon switched to search from GoTo.com.
Source: Wikipedia: Infoseek
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2001Whacked
The Crash
Excite@Home bankruptcy (2001)
September 28, 2001
Excite@Home, formed when Excite merged with cable provider @Home in 1999, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The Excite portal was sold that December for $10 million.
Sources: The Daily Cardinal, Wikipedia: Excite
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2001Bought out
The Butler's Brain
Teoma (2001)
September 18, 2001
Apostolos Gerasoulis and colleagues at Rutgers University founded Teoma in April 2000 to rank pages by link analysis within topic communities. Ask Jeeves bought it on September 18, 2001.
Source: Wikipedia: Teoma
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2001Opened shop
The Dress
Google Image Search (2001)
July 12, 2001 · A Google moment
Google launched image search on July 12, 2001. Google has said demand for pictures of the green Versace dress Jennifer Lopez wore in February 2000 pushed it to build the product.
Source: Wikipedia: Google Images
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2002Whacked
Closing the Cabinet
Northern Light leaves web search (2002)
January 2002
Northern Light closed its free public search engine to focus on business customers.
Source: Wikipedia: Northern Light Group
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2002Bought out
Buying the Muscle
Yahoo buys Inktomi (2002)
December 23, 2002
Yahoo agreed to buy Inktomi, the search technology behind HotBot and MSN, for about $241 million. The deal closed on March 19, 2003.
Source: Wikipedia: Inktomi
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2003Bought out
The Old Boss Changes Hands
Overture buys AltaVista (2003)
February 2003
Overture agreed to buy AltaVista from CMGI as it tried to build a search engine of its own to compete with Google.
Sources: Wikipedia: AltaVista, Salon
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2003Bought out
The Norwegian Job
Overture buys AllTheWeb (2003)
February 25, 2003
Overture agreed to buy the web search unit of Norway's Fast Search and Transfer, including AllTheWeb, for $70 million in cash.
Sources: SEC filing, Writers Write
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2003Bought out
The Whole Crew
Yahoo buys Overture (2003)
July 2003
Yahoo agreed to buy Overture for about $1.63 billion, picking up AltaVista and AllTheWeb with it. The deal closed on October 7, 2003.
Sources: Wikipedia: Overture Services, Inc., Salon
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2004Opened shop
Cutting Ties
Yahoo drops Google (2004)
February 2004 · A Google moment
Yahoo replaced Google's results with its own crawler based engine, Yahoo Search Technology, built from Inktomi and Overture.
Source: Wikipedia: Yahoo Search
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2004Absorbed
The Butler Buys the Portal
Ask Jeeves buys Excite (2004)
March 2004
Ask Jeeves bought Excite.com and iWon.com for $150 million in cash plus stock.
Source: Wikipedia: Excite
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2004Bought out
Pennies on the Dollar
Lycos sold to Daum (2004)
October 2004
Terra sold Lycos to South Korea's Daum for $95.4 million in cash, a tiny fraction of its 2000 price.
Source: Wikipedia: Lycos
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2004Opened shop
Showing the Books
Snap (2004)
October 2004
Bill Gross of Idealab unveiled the Snap search engine in public beta at the Web 2.0 conference in October 2004. It mixed shopping tables with web results and showed searchers how much advertisers paid for each paid listing.
Source: InternetNews
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2005Opened shop
Microsoft Goes Solo
MSN Search builds its own engine (2005)
February 1, 2005
Microsoft launched a new MSN Search built entirely in house. MSN Search had relied on other companies' results since 1998.
Sources: Microsoft, Wikipedia: Microsoft Bing
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2005Bought out
The Butler Gets a New Boss
IAC buys Ask Jeeves (2005)
March 21, 2005
Barry Diller's IAC agreed to buy Ask Jeeves in a stock deal worth about $1.85 billion. The deal was completed in July 2005.
Sources: Cleary Gottlieb, Wikipedia: Ask.com
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2006Whacked
The Butler Gets Whacked
Jeeves retired (2006)
February 27, 2006
Ask Jeeves retired its butler mascot and renamed itself Ask.com.
Sources: Fox News, Wikipedia: Ask.com
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2006Absorbed
New Name, Same Crew
Windows Live Search (2006)
September 2006
Microsoft replaced MSN Search with Windows Live Search, shortened to Live Search in March 2007.
Source: Wikipedia: Microsoft Bing
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2008Opened shop
All Talk
Cuil (2008)
July 28, 2008
Cuil launched with big claims of the largest index on the web, about 120 billion pages, but drew heavy criticism for poor results.
Source: Wikipedia: Cuil
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2008Still standing
Nobody Talks
DuckDuckGo (2008)
September 25, 2008
Gabriel Weinberg launched DuckDuckGo. Since 2010 it has competed on privacy, promising not to track users.
Source: Wikipedia: DuckDuckGo
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2008Whacked
Everybody Edits
Wikia Search (2008)
January 7, 2008
Jimmy Wales's company Wikia launched Wikia Search as a public alpha on January 7, 2008, letting users edit and rate results. Wales ended it in 2009 because few people used it, and it went offline on May 14, 2009.
Source: Wikipedia: Wikia Search
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2009Still standing
The Accountant
Wolfram Alpha (2009)
May 18, 2009
Wolfram Research launched Wolfram Alpha, an answer engine that computes answers from curated data instead of returning a list of links.
Source: Wikipedia: Wolfram Alpha
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2009Still standing
The Number Two
Bing (2009)
June 3, 2009
Microsoft renamed Live Search as Bing, announced by Steve Ballmer on May 28, 2009. It became the clear number two engine worldwide.
Source: Wikipedia: Microsoft Bing
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2009Absorbed
The Arrangement
Microsoft and Yahoo search deal (2009)
July 29, 2009
Microsoft and Yahoo signed a ten year deal making Bing the engine behind Yahoo Search, with Yahoo selling premium ads for both.
Sources: Microsoft, Wikipedia: Yahoo Search
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2009Still standing
The Tree Planters
Ecosia (2009)
December 7, 2009
Christian Kroll launched Ecosia from Berlin on December 7, 2009. It spends its ad profits on tree planting and other climate projects, and it gets most of its results from larger search engines.
Source: Wikipedia: Ecosia
Search engine history, 2010 to 2021The Graveyard
The old names go quiet one at a time. Yahoo hands its results to Bing, and the directories that built the web close for good.
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2010Absorbed
Yahoo Takes a Knee
Bing starts powering Yahoo (2010)
August 24, 2010
Yahoo's regular search results in the United States and Canada began coming from Bing, ending Yahoo's own engine there.
Sources: SiliconANGLE, Wikipedia: Yahoo Search
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2010Bought out
Sold Again
Lycos sold to Ybrant (2010)
August 2010
Daum sold Lycos to India's Ybrant Digital for $36 million.
Source: Wikipedia: Lycos
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2010Whacked
Gone Without a Word
Cuil shut down (2010)
September 17, 2010
Cuil's servers went dark about two years after launch, and staff were told only that morning.
Source: Wikipedia: Cuil
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2010Opened shop
Hand Picked
Blekko (2010)
November 1, 2010
Blekko launched to the public with slashtags that let users narrow results to hand picked sources.
Source: Wikipedia: Blekko
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2010Absorbed
The Butler Hangs It Up
Ask.com exits search (2010)
November 2010
Ask.com shut its own web crawler, cut about 130 engineers and went back to answering questions using another company's search results.
Sources: The Register, Wikipedia: Ask.com
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2011Opened shop
Talk to Me
Siri on iPhone 4S (2011)
October 4, 2011
Apple announced the iPhone 4S on October 4, 2011, with Siri, a voice assistant that answers spoken questions. The phone went on sale October 14 in the US and six other countries.
Source: Apple Newsroom
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2013Whacked
The Old Boss Gets Whacked
AltaVista shut down (2013)
July 8, 2013
Yahoo shut AltaVista down, sending its address to Yahoo Search. The closure was announced on June 28 as one item on a list of cuts.
Sources: Salon, Wikipedia: AltaVista
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2013Still standing
The French Connection
Qwant (2013)
July 4, 2013
Qwant, a French search engine based in Paris, released its final version on July 4, 2013, after a beta that February. It markets itself as a search engine that does not track its users.
Source: Wikipedia: Qwant
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2014Whacked
Closing the Front Door
Yahoo Directory closed (2014)
December 31, 2014
Yahoo retired the directory it was founded on, saying on September 26, 2014 that its business had evolved.
Sources: PCWorld, Wikipedia: Yahoo Directory
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2014Opened shop
Always Listening
Amazon Echo and Alexa (2014)
November 6, 2014
Amazon announced the Echo speaker and its Alexa voice assistant on November 6, 2014, sold at first by invitation. You say Alexa to wake it, then ask questions or give commands.
Sources: Fortune, Wikipedia: Amazon Echo
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2015Bought out
Taken Off the Street
IBM buys Blekko (2015)
March 2015
IBM bought Blekko for its Watson team and shut the public search engine on March 27, 2015.
Source: Wikipedia: Blekko
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2015Turning point
Pocket Size
Mobile passes desktop (2015)
May 5, 2015 · A Google moment
Google said on May 5, 2015 that more of its searches came from mobile devices than from computers in 10 countries, including the US and Japan. It did not name the other countries or give exact percentages.
Sources: MarTech, Benton Institute
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2017Whacked
The Volunteers Go Home
DMOZ closed (2017)
March 2017
AOL closed DMOZ, the volunteer directory once used by Google and many others, saying it no longer wished to support it.
Source: Wikipedia: DMOZ
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2017Opened shop
Point and Shoot
Google Lens (2017)
May 17, 2017 · A Google moment
Sundar Pichai announced Google Lens at Google I/O on May 17, 2017, letting a phone camera recognize objects, text and places and act on them. It first shipped on Pixel phones that October.
Sources: TechCrunch, Wikipedia: Google Lens
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2020Still standing
The Family Name
Microsoft Bing (2020)
October 5, 2020
Microsoft renamed Bing to Microsoft Bing on October 5, 2020. The company said the new name reflects how closely search is tied into its other products.
Source: The Next Web
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2021Still standing
Its Own Book
Brave Search (2021)
June 22, 2021
Brave launched a beta of Brave Search, a privacy focused engine with its own index built on Tailcat, which it bought from the Cliqz team.
Sources: The Register, Wikipedia: Brave Search
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2021Opened shop
The Defector
Neeva (2021)
June 29, 2021
Former Google ads chief Sridhar Ramaswamy launched Neeva, an ad free search engine for $4.95 a month.
Sources: SiliconANGLE, Wikipedia: Neeva
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2021Opened shop
The New Kid
You.com (2021)
November 9, 2021
Former Salesforce researchers Richard Socher and Bryan McCann opened You.com in public beta. It added the YouChat AI assistant on December 23, 2022.
Source: Wikipedia: You.com
Search engine history, 2022 to nowThe New Families
AI answer engines move into the neighborhood, and a federal judge calls Google a monopolist.
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2022Moving up
Kids These Days
TikTok as a search engine (2022)
July 12, 2022
Google executive Prabhakar Raghavan said almost 40 percent of young people looking for lunch go to TikTok or Instagram instead of Google Search or Maps. Google said the figure came from a survey of 18 to 24 year olds in the United States.
Sources: TechCrunch, Localogy
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2022Still standing
The Answer Man
Perplexity (2022)
December 7, 2022
Perplexity, founded that August by Aravind Srinivas and others, launched an AI answer engine that writes replies with cited sources.
Source: Wikipedia: Perplexity AI
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2023Opened shop
The Number Two Makes a Move
Bing Chat (2023)
February 7, 2023
Microsoft launched a new Bing with a chat assistant built on OpenAI models. It was folded into Microsoft Copilot in November 2023.
Sources: Microsoft, Wikipedia: Microsoft Bing
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2023Whacked
The Defector Folds
Neeva shut down (2023)
June 2, 2023
Neeva closed its consumer search engine, announced on May 20, 2023, and Snowflake bought the company.
Source: Wikipedia: Neeva
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2024Opened shop
The Answer
Google AI Overviews (2024)
May 14, 2024 · A Google moment
Google began showing AI written summaries at the top of results for all users in the United States.
Source: Google
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2024
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2024Opened shop
The New Family in Town
ChatGPT search (2024)
October 31, 2024
OpenAI added web search to ChatGPT, growing out of its SearchGPT prototype, for paying users first.
Source: TechCrunch
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2025Opened shop
The New Boss
Google AI Mode (2025)
May 20, 2025 · A Google moment
Google announced at its I/O conference that AI Mode, a chat style way to search, was rolling out to everyone in the United States.
Source: TechCrunch
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2025Sentenced
The Sentence
Google antitrust remedies (2025)
September 2, 2025 · A Google moment
Judge Mehta declined to force a sale of Chrome but banned exclusive default deals and ordered Google to share some search data with rivals for six years. Google can still pay Apple to be the default.
Sources: Fortune, Computerworld
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2026Whacked
The Last of the Butler
Ask.com shut down (2026)
May 1, 2026
IAC closed Ask.com as it left the search business, ending the site that began as Ask Jeeves almost 30 years earlier.
Sources: Engadget, Wikipedia: Ask.com
The machine
How search engines work. Four steps.
Every engine on this timeline, from JumpStation to ChatGPT, does some version of the same four jobs.
- 1
Crawl
Robots called crawlers follow links from page to page and download what they find. The Wanderer did it first in 1993. Google, Bing and the rest still do it billions of times a day.
- 2
Index
Everything the crawlers find gets sorted into a giant index, like the index at the back of a book, so the engine can find every page that uses a word in a fraction of a second.
- 3
Rank
When you search, the engine pulls every matching page and puts them in order. Early engines counted keywords. Google ranked by links. Today ranking uses hundreds of signals, plus AI that reads the meaning of the question.
- 4
Answer
The newest step. AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT search and Perplexity read the top pages and write the answer themselves, with links to the sources they used.
The full list
Every search engine. One table.
Every moment on the record, oldest first. Tap a name to jump to its card.
| Year | Engine or event | Date | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1945 | As We May Think | July 1945 | Imagined |
| 1960 | SMART at Cornell | 1960s | Invented |
| 1990 | Archie | September 10, 1990 | Opened shop |
| 1991 | Veronica and Jughead | 1991 | Opened shop |
| 1991 | The first website | August 6, 1991 | Went live |
| 1991 | WWW Virtual Library | 1991 | Opened shop |
| 1993 | W3Catalog | September 2, 1993 | Opened shop |
| 1993 | Aliweb | November 30, 1993 | Opened shop |
| 1993 | World Wide Web Wanderer | June 1993 | Opened shop |
| 1993 | JumpStation | December 12, 1993 | Whacked |
| 1994 | Yahoo Directory | January 1994 | Opened shop |
| 1994 | Infoseek | January 1994 | Opened shop |
| 1994 | WebCrawler | April 20, 1994 | Opened shop |
| 1994 | Lycos | July 1994 | Opened shop |
| 1995 | AOL buys WebCrawler | June 1, 1995 | Bought out |
| 1995 | Excite | October 1995 | Opened shop |
| 1995 | AltaVista | December 15, 1995 | Moving up |
| 1996 | HotBot and Inktomi | May 27, 1996 | Opened shop |
| 1996 | LookSmart | October 28, 1996 | Opened shop |
| 1996 | Dogpile | November 1996 | Still standing |
| 1996 | Magellan | June 1996 | Bought out |
| 1996 | BackRub | 1996 | Moving up |
| 1996 | RankDex | 1996 | Opened shop |
| 1997 | Ask Jeeves | June 1, 1997 | Opened shop |
| 1997 | Northern Light | August 1997 | Opened shop |
| 1997 | Yandex | September 23, 1997 | Still standing |
| 1998 | GoTo.com | February 1998 | Moving up |
| 1998 | DMOZ Open Directory | June 5, 1998 | Opened shop |
| 1998 | September 4, 1998 | Still standing | |
| 1998 | Lycos buys HotBot | October 1998 | Bought out |
| 1998 | The Anatomy of a Search Engine | April 1998 | Published |
| 1998 | MSN Search | 1998 | Opened shop |
| 1998 | Direct Hit | April 1998 | Bought out |
| 1999 | Naver | June 2, 1999 | Still standing |
| 1999 | Disney takes over Infoseek | July 1999 | Bought out |
| 1999 | AllTheWeb | 1999 | Whacked |
| 2000 | Baidu | January 18, 2000 | Still standing |
| 2000 | Yahoo uses Google results | 2000 | Moving up |
| 2000 | Terra buys Lycos | October 2000 | Bought out |
| 2000 | Google AdWords | October 23, 2000 | Moving up |
| 2001 | Infoseek shut down | February 2001 | Whacked |
| 2001 | Excite@Home bankruptcy | September 28, 2001 | Whacked |
| 2001 | Teoma | September 18, 2001 | Bought out |
| 2001 | Google Image Search | July 12, 2001 | Opened shop |
| 2002 | Northern Light leaves web search | January 2002 | Whacked |
| 2002 | Yahoo buys Inktomi | December 23, 2002 | Bought out |
| 2003 | Overture buys AltaVista | February 2003 | Bought out |
| 2003 | Overture buys AllTheWeb | February 25, 2003 | Bought out |
| 2003 | Yahoo buys Overture | July 2003 | Bought out |
| 2004 | Yahoo drops Google | February 2004 | Opened shop |
| 2004 | Ask Jeeves buys Excite | March 2004 | Absorbed |
| 2004 | Lycos sold to Daum | October 2004 | Bought out |
| 2004 | Snap | October 2004 | Opened shop |
| 2005 | MSN Search builds its own engine | February 1, 2005 | Opened shop |
| 2005 | IAC buys Ask Jeeves | March 21, 2005 | Bought out |
| 2006 | Jeeves retired | February 27, 2006 | Whacked |
| 2006 | Windows Live Search | September 2006 | Absorbed |
| 2008 | Cuil | July 28, 2008 | Opened shop |
| 2008 | DuckDuckGo | September 25, 2008 | Still standing |
| 2008 | Wikia Search | January 7, 2008 | Whacked |
| 2009 | Wolfram Alpha | May 18, 2009 | Still standing |
| 2009 | Bing | June 3, 2009 | Still standing |
| 2009 | Microsoft and Yahoo search deal | July 29, 2009 | Absorbed |
| 2009 | Ecosia | December 7, 2009 | Still standing |
| 2010 | Bing starts powering Yahoo | August 24, 2010 | Absorbed |
| 2010 | Lycos sold to Ybrant | August 2010 | Bought out |
| 2010 | Cuil shut down | September 17, 2010 | Whacked |
| 2010 | Blekko | November 1, 2010 | Opened shop |
| 2010 | Ask.com exits search | November 2010 | Absorbed |
| 2011 | Siri on iPhone 4S | October 4, 2011 | Opened shop |
| 2013 | AltaVista shut down | July 8, 2013 | Whacked |
| 2013 | Qwant | July 4, 2013 | Still standing |
| 2014 | Yahoo Directory closed | December 31, 2014 | Whacked |
| 2014 | Amazon Echo and Alexa | November 6, 2014 | Opened shop |
| 2015 | IBM buys Blekko | March 2015 | Bought out |
| 2015 | Mobile passes desktop | May 5, 2015 | Turning point |
| 2017 | DMOZ closed | March 2017 | Whacked |
| 2017 | Google Lens | May 17, 2017 | Opened shop |
| 2020 | Microsoft Bing | October 5, 2020 | Still standing |
| 2021 | Brave Search | June 22, 2021 | Still standing |
| 2021 | Neeva | June 29, 2021 | Opened shop |
| 2021 | You.com | November 9, 2021 | Opened shop |
| 2022 | TikTok as a search engine | July 12, 2022 | Moving up |
| 2022 | Perplexity | December 7, 2022 | Still standing |
| 2023 | Bing Chat | February 7, 2023 | Opened shop |
| 2023 | Neeva shut down | June 2, 2023 | Whacked |
| 2024 | Google AI Overviews | May 14, 2024 | Opened shop |
| 2024 | US v. Google ruling | August 5, 2024 | Indicted |
| 2024 | Google dips below 90 percent | October 2024 | Bleeding |
| 2024 | ChatGPT search | October 31, 2024 | Opened shop |
| 2025 | Google AI Mode | May 20, 2025 | Opened shop |
| 2025 | Google antitrust remedies | September 2, 2025 | Sentenced |
| 2026 | Ask.com shut down | May 1, 2026 | Whacked |
What comes next
The future of search. Four things to watch.
Answers before links
Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and Perplexity all put an AI written answer first. Fewer searches end with a click, so being the source the AI cites matters more than ranking tenth.
Search without a box
People search by talking to Siri and Alexa, by pointing a camera with Google Lens, and by asking a chatbot a full question. The search box is one door of many.
The courts reshape the deals
In 2025 a federal judge banned Google from exclusive default search deals and ordered it to share some search data with rivals. Defaults on phones and browsers are now open to competition.
New families keep coming
Every era of this timeline ended with a newcomer the old bosses did not take seriously. AltaVista ignored Google. The next family could already be on this page.
The questions
Search engine history. Straight answers.
What was the first search engine?
Archie, released on September 10, 1990 by Alan Emtage, a student at McGill University in Montreal. It indexed the file names on public FTP servers. For the web itself there are three firsts: W3Catalog in September 1993 was the first web search engine, JumpStation in December 1993 was the first to crawl, index and search in one tool, and WebCrawler in April 1994 was the first to search the full text of web pages.
What was the first web crawler?
The World Wide Web Wanderer, built by Matthew Gray at MIT in June 1993 to measure the size of the web. Its crawl produced an index called Wandex later that year.
What was the first web search engine to search every word on a page?
WebCrawler, launched on April 20, 1994. Earlier tools only searched titles, file names or hand kept lists.
What happened to AltaVista?
AltaVista launched in December 1995 and was one of the most used search engines of the late 1990s. Overture bought it in 2003, Yahoo bought Overture later that year, and Yahoo shut AltaVista down on July 8, 2013.
What happened to Ask Jeeves?
Ask Jeeves launched in 1997 with a butler who answered questions in plain English. IAC bought it in 2005, retired the butler and renamed it Ask.com in 2006, shut its own crawler in 2010, and closed Ask.com on May 1, 2026.
What search engines no longer exist?
Search engines that shut down include JumpStation, AllTheWeb, Infoseek, Northern Light, Wikia Search, Cuil, AltaVista, Yahoo Directory, DMOZ, Neeva, Ask.com. Every one is on the timeline above with the date it went dark.
What is the second biggest search engine?
Bing, launched by Microsoft in June 2009. It also powers Yahoo Search in the United States and Canada since 2010. Google still handles most searches worldwide, though StatCounter put its share below 90 percent in late 2024 for the first time since 2015.
When was Google founded?
September 4, 1998, by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in Menlo Park, California, building on a Stanford research project. Every Google update since then has its own timeline on this site.