History of the most popular websites in the world

Looking back on the most popular websites, there are some big names that disappeared!

30 years of social media and search engines, this short video from Facebook shows how the internet has grown over 3 decades.

The history of search engines
The history of search engines can be traced back to the early days of the internet in the 1990s. Here is a brief overview of the major milestones in the development of search engines:

1. Archie: Created in 1990, Archie was the first search engine. It was designed to search for files on FTP sites and was used primarily by academic researchers.
2. Gopher: Developed in 1991, Gopher was a menu-driven search engine that allowed users to navigate through hierarchical menus to find information.
3. Veronica: Developed in 1992, Veronica was a search engine for Gopher that allowed users to search for specific keywords within the menus.
4. WAIS: Developed in 1993, Wide Area Information Servers (WAIS) was a search engine that allowed users to search for text documents using a query language.
5. Aliweb: Created in 1993, Aliweb was the first search engine to index web pages. However, it relied on webmasters submitting their pages manually, which limited its usefulness.
6. WebCrawler: Developed in 1994, WebCrawler was the first search engine to index the entire web automatically. It quickly became popular and was acquired by AOL in 1995.
7. Yahoo!: Launched in 1995, Yahoo! was initially a directory of web pages that were organised by categories. It later added a search function and became one of the most popular search engines of the late 1990s.
8. AltaVista: Developed in 1995, AltaVista was the first search engine to use a crawler to index the entire web automatically. It quickly became popular and was acquired by Yahoo! in 2003.
9. Google: Developed in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google was initially a research project at Stanford University. It quickly became the most popular search engine due to its superior search algorithms, which prioritised relevant results over keyword density.
10. Bing: Developed by Microsoft, Bing was launched in 2009. It has since become the second most popular search engine, behind Google.

Today, search engines are an integral part of our daily lives, with billions of searches performed every day. They have revolutionized the way we access information and have made the internet an indispensable tool for research, commerce, and communication.