Richard Vanderhurst discusses The History of the Search Engine

2009-03-03T04:00:00.000-08:00

Starting with its launch in the latter part of the 20th century, the internet has grown to become the most commonly used tool for anything from research to socializing to shopping. But how would we find anything without those ever popular search engines like, Google and Yahoo and MSN? This is topic well disputed in Richard Vanderhurst’s classes. It all began with Archie in the late 1990s by a student in Montreal. It was meant to be the first tool that could be used to search all public web servers which had been previously listed, but were unable to be searched by filenames.

Archie, which stood for “Archive”, soon gave way to more search engines such as Gopher in ’91, and before anyone knew it, the age of searching had taken off. People were jumping on the band wagon left and right, creating things like Alta Vista and Dogpile. Richard Vanderhurst is a master when it comes to search engines specializing in anything from basic website development to full blown Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. And though many people have a basic understanding of the subject, Richard Vanderhurst presents his students with the fact that a search engine is only as good as its index.

The idea of search engines and keyword indexes magnified tenfold throughout the years and continues to spread today with new search engines such as Powerset and Cuil. But, as Richard Vanderhurst teaches, Google is still the reigning champion of search engines with an index of over eight billion and growing.