The Search Engine Evolution Timeline [Infographic]

For a while, the Internet was just one giant document storage center. There was no optimized way to search for what you were looking for, and the Internet itself was sluggish, at best. When search engines started to become available to us, things changed significantly. The evolution of the Internet was kickstarted by search engines, and we’re still adding to that today. The evolution timeline might not be known to the younger Internet users, so let’s take a trip down memory lane.

Search engines have always been the cog wheels of the Internet so to speak. They make finding fresh things a breeze, and without them, coming up with new services and trying to make them popular would be quite a monumental task. Search engines are defined by the way we use the Internet, but they also define how we should use the Internet according to the largest search engines. The search engine evolution timeline might look sparse if we look at how many popular search engines are available to us today. But don’t be fooled, the search engines have many more branches than that. We even find lightweight search engines on most websites which help us navigate the content on it. So as you see, the evolution timeline branches off into several different directions.

So where did this search engine evolution timeline start? With the help of a fresh infographic presented by Monetate called The Evolution Of The Search Engine, we get a glimpse at how search engines came to dominate the Internet.

The first search engines that were made available to us were actually Aliweb and JumpStation back in 1993. These search engines might not have become the core of the Internet like Google, Bing or Yahoo, but they were the first ones to help us navigate the enormous amount of content that was available.

The usefulness of search engines goes far beyond the simple search for content. They help businesses sell more products or services, and they give new websites the ability to compete and increase their traffic with already popular websites, but that’s not all of it. They also helps progress the Internet in the way users want it to progress by presenting the most fresh and popular content. Where search engines will head in the future is of course hard to say as new algorithms are continuously created and launched in order to perfect, sift and unfortunately censor what we, the users, create and upload to the Internet. So the question really is, what do we want the Internet to be tomorrow?