History of search engines
In the early days of the development of the Internet, its users were a privileged minority and the amount of information available was relatively small. Access was limited mainly to employees of various universities and laboratories who used it to access scientific information. In those days, the problem of finding information on the Internet was not nearly as critical as it is now.
Site directories were one of the first methods used to facilitate access to information resources on the network. Links to these resources are grouped according to topic. Yahoo was the first project of its kind opened in April 1994. How many places in the Yahoo directory inexorably increased, the developers of Yahoo made searchable directory. Of course, it was not a search engine in its true form, because it was limited to the search of these sources who were placed in directory listings. It does not actively seek out resources and the concept of SEO is still accomplish.
Such link directories are widely used in the past, but nowadays they have lost much of their popularity. The reason is simple - even modern directories with lots of resources only provide information on a small portion of the website. For example, large directory on the network is currently DMOZ (or Open Directory Project). It contains information on about five million resources. Compare this with the Google search engine database that contains more than eight billion documents.
Project webcrawler began in 1994 and was the first full-featured search engine. Lycos and AltaVista search engines appeared in 1995 and for many years Alta Vista was the major player in this field.
In 1997 Sergey Brin and Larry Page created Google as a research project at Stanford University. Google is now the most popular search engine in the world.
Currently, there are three major international search engines - Google, Yahoo and MSN Search. They each have their databases and search algorithms. Many other search engines use results originating from these three major search engines and the same SEO expertise can be applied to all of them. For example, search engine AOL (search.aol.com) uses the Google database while AltaVista, Lycos and AlltheWeb all use the Yahoo database.
