The Evolution of Search Engine

I am going to talk a bit about how I see Yahoo and Google search engine evolve.

My first search engine was Yahoo. At that time, Yahoo was the only thing I knew about the Net. It was resourceful and effective. It provided directory listing as well as searching and served very much of my needs. Unfortunately, it was not very late that I discovered the search was not fulfilling my ever demanding keywords. At first, I tried to accept the fact that this is the limitation of search engine and for a time I relied on the links in the pages that I visited to crawl unknown pages. Later, I found out there was something called web ring. This is one of the more effective ways of finding related sites.

My first encounter of Google was at the university. One day, I noticed those top students in my class were having fun trying out a mysterious site. I sneak peeked from the back and realized it was Google. The first 3 months of using Google was not very pleasing. The new search engine returned way too many junks. It was virtually impossible to get any high quality sites. I exploited the strength of both Yahoo and Google. Yahoo was used for high quality site search and Google was used if Yahoo returned nothing on the keyword.

Things were getting alright for a while. When I noticed I used Google more often than Yahoo, I was migrating to Google without knowing. Google started to get more publicity and was extremely popular among the users at the academic world. Google became the valuable tools for them because Yahoo failed to index enough keywords to serve them well.

With enough hits per day, Google started to introduce more and more services just like what Yahoo has been doing for years. However, there were major differences in the approach. The first service that caught my eyes was the Google Groups. It was a Holy Grail to me as I need to find out known technical solutions in the Usenet. By combining the Web and the Usenet search, I was able to get answers of almost anything.

The subsequent services were boring until Google Earth and Google Desktop came into picture. Once again it caught my eyes because Microsoft was beginning to realize the power of Google. This was the time when Google took the search engine crown and overtook Yahoo as the most popular search engine of all time. This was the time when most of the world media started to report on Google matters.