Best Search engine

Sameer Medhekar (Student) (4140 Points)

23 January 2009  

 A search engine is designed to search for information on the World Wide Web. Information may consist of web pages, images and other types of files. In 1993, Matthew Gray at MIT developed the first Web search engine Wandex. There were over 1000 search engines providing varying search results to online users. Popular among them are Ask.com (formerly Ask Jeeves), Baidu (Chinese), Cuil, Exalead (French), Gigablast, Google, Live Search (formerly MSN Search), gou (Chinese), Sohu (Chinese), Wikia Search, Yahoo! Search. Top ten search engine based on the Nielsen//NetRatings, 2007 are 



Provider Share of Total Searches 

Google 55.2 Percent 

Yahoo 21.9 Percent

MSN/Windows Live 9 Percent

AOL 5.4 Percent

Ask.com 1.8 Percent

My Web Search 1 Percent

Comcast 0.5 Percent

EarthLink 0.4 Percent

Dogpile.com 0.4 Percent

My Way 0.4 Percent

Other 3.9 Percent

All search 100 Percent

Source: Nielsen//NetRatings, 2007



Most of the search engine derived their revenues through advertisements and paid listings, a good many served as secondary service offerings. The industry saw many other players who also offered compatible services on competitive pricings. The smaller players targeted niche segments offering differentiated service or distinctive search technology. Since 1993 industry has seen various launches (see list) few of them survived and few had a premature death. 



The best search engines launches:

Year Event Search Engine

1993 Launch Aliweb

1994 Launch WebCrawler

1994 Launch Infoseek

1994 Launch Lycos

1995 Launch (part of DEC) AltaVista

1995 Launch Excite

1996 Founded HotBot

1996 Founded Ask Jeeves

1998 Launch Google

1999 Founded Teoma

2000 Founded Baidu

2003 Launch Info.com

2004 Final launch Yahoo! Search

2004 Launch A9.com

2006 Founded Quaero

2006 Launch Live Search

2006 Beta Launch ChaCha

2006 Beta Launch Guruji.com

2007 Launched Wikiseek

2008 Launched Cuil



The fact remains unchallenged and probably there is no parallel to Google.