Ask

Ask.com was originally known as Ask Jeeves, "Jeeves" being the name of a "gentleman's personal gentleman", or valet, felching answers to any question asked. The character was based on Bertie Wooster's valet Jeeves, in the fictional works of P. G. Wodehouse.

The original idea behind Ask Jeeves was to allow users to get answers to questions posed in everyday, natural language, as well as by traditional keyword searching. The current Ask.com still supports this, with support for math, dictionary, and conversion questions. Ask.com headquarters in Oakland, California

In 2005 the company announced plans to phase out Jeeves and on February 27, 2006, the character disappeared from Ask.com. He was stated to be "going into retirement." However, the UK/Ireland edition of the website prominently brought the character back in 2009.

alltheweb

When AlltheWeb started in 1999, FAST aimed to provide their database to other search engines, copying the successful case of Inktomi. In January 2000, Lycos used their results in the Lycos PRO search. By that time, the AlltheWeb database had grown from 80 million URIs to 200 million. Their aim was to index all the publicly accessible web. Their crawler indexed over 2 billion pages by June 2002[2] and started a fresh round of the search engine size war. Before their purchase by Yahoo!, the database contained about 3.3 billion URIs.

AlltheWeb claimed a few advantages over Google, such as a fresher database, more advanced search features, search clustering and a completely customizable look.[2][3][4] Its image search would also take the viewer directly to the image rather than to the page where it was displayed.

dmoz

DMOZ was founded in the United States as Gnuhoo by Rich Skrenta and Bob Truel in 1998 while they were both working as engineers for Sun Microsystems. Chris Tolles, who worked at Sun Microsystems as the head of marketing for network security products, also signed on in 1998 as a co-founder of Gnuhoo along with co-founders Bryn Dole and Jeremy Wenokur. Skrenta had developed TASS, an ancestor of tin, the popular threaded Usenet newsreader for Unix systems. Coincidentally, the original category structure of the Gnuhoo directory was based loosely on the structure of Usenet newsgroups then in existence.

All websites would gain prominence on search engines listed with dmoz. Swishweb uses this as a tool for checking relevance of sites content

excite

Excite (stylized as excite) is a collection of web sites and services, launched in December 1995. Excite is an online service offering a variety of content, including an Internet portal showing news and weather etc. (outside USA only), a search engine, a web-based email, instant messaging, stock quotes, and a customizable user homepage. The content is collated from over 100 different sources.

Excite's portal and services are owned by Excite Networks, but in the USA, Excite is a personal portal, called My Excite, which is operated by Mindspark and owned by IAC Search and Media.

In the 1990s, Excite was one of the most recognized brands on the Internet.

Google

Google began in March 1998 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Ph.D. students at Stanford University.

In search of a dissertation theme, Page had been considering—among other things—exploring the mathematical properties of the World Wide Web, understanding its link structure as a huge graph.His supervisor, Terry Winograd, encouraged him to pick this idea (which Page later recalled as "the best advice I ever got" and Page focused on the problem of finding out which web pages link to a given page, based on the consideration that the number and nature of such backlinks was valuable information for an analysis of that page (with the role of citations in academic publishing in mind).

In his research project, nicknamed "BackRub", Page was soon joined by Brin, who was supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship. Brin was already a close friend, whom Page had first met in the summer of 1995—Page was part of a group of potential new students that Brin had volunteered to show around the campus. Both Brin and Page were working on the Stanford Digital Library Project (SDLP). The SDLP's goal was “to develop the enabling technologies for a single, integrated and universal digital library" and it was funded through the National Science Foundation, among other federal agencies.

HOTBOT

HotBot became a popular tool with search results served by the Inktomi database and directory results provided originally by LookSmart and then DMOZ since mid-1999. Hotbot also used search data from Direct Hit for a period, which was a tool that used click-through data to manipulate results. It was launched using a "new links" strategy of marketing, claiming to update its search database more often than its competitors. It also offered free webpage hosting, but only for a short time, and it was taken down without any notice to its users. It was one of the first search engines to offer the ability to search within search results.

LYCOS

Lycos is a university spin-off that began as a research project by Michael Loren Mauldin of Carnegie Mellon University's main Pittsburgh campus in 1994. Lycos Inc. was formed with approximately US $2 million ($3.2 million today) in venture capital funding from CMGI. Bob Davis became the CEO and first employee of the new company in 1995, and concentrated on building the company into an advertising-supported web portal. Lycos enjoyed several years of growth during the 1990s and became the most visited online destination in the world in 1999, with a global presence in more than 40 countries.

In 1996, the company completed the fastest IPO from inception to offering in NASDAQ history. In 1997, it became one of the first profitable internet businesses in the world. In 1998, Lycos paid $58 million ($83.9 million today) for Tripod in an attempt to "break into the portal market." Over the course of the next few years, Lycos acquired nearly two dozen internet brands including Gamesville, WhoWhere, Wired Digital (eventually sold to Wired), Quote.com, Angelfire, Matchmaker.com and Raging Bull.

MSN

During early development of the web, there was a list of webservers edited by Tim Berners-Lee and hosted on the CERN webserver. One historical snapshot of the list in 1992 remains, but as more and more webservers went online the central list could no longer keep up. On the NCSA site, new servers were announced under the title "What's New!"

The first tool used for searching on the Internet was Archie. The name stands for "archive" without the "v". It was created in 1990 by Alan Emtage, Bill Heelan and J. Peter Deutsch, computer science students at McGill University in Montreal. The program downloaded the directory listings of all the files located on public anonymous FTP (File Transfer Protocol) sites, creating a searchable database of file names; however, Archie did not index the contents of these sites since the amount of data was so limited it could be readily searched manually.

YAHOO

Yahoo! was started at Stanford University. It was founded in January 1994 by Jerry Yang and David Filo, who were Electrical Engineering graduate students when they created a website named "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web". The Guide was a directory of other websites, organized in a hierarchy, as opposed to a searchable index of pages. In April 1994, Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web was renamed "Yahoo!".The yahoo.com domain was created on January 18, 1995.

Yahoo! grew rapidly throughout the 1990s and diversified into a web portal, followed by numerous high-profile acquisitions. The company's stock price skyrocketed during the dot-com bubble and closed at an all-time high of US$118.75 in 2000; however, after the dot-com bubble burst, it reached an all-time low of US$8.11 in 2001. Yahoo! formally rejected an acquisition bid from the Microsoft Corporation in 2008. In early 2012, the largest layoff in Yahoo!'s history was completed and 2,000 employees (14 percent of the workforce) lost their jobs.