Detailed · 9 events
A History of Search Engines
1990s
03 events
Verizon Media / Pentagram (Wikimedia Commons) · Public domain (below threshold of originality; trademark applies) · Commons ↗ Jerry Yang and David Filo, doctoral students in electrical engineering at Stanford, published their personal bookmark list as 'Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web' in early 1994 and renamed it 'Yahoo!' that March. The hierarchically organised, hand-curated directory became the first real map of a web that full-text search could not yet read. The company was incorporated in March 1995, went public in April 1996 at a market capitalisation of roughly US$848 million, and by 1998 was serving 95 million page views a day. Through the 2000s, Google's algorithmic ranking displaced it from the centre of the web, and Verizon's US$4.48 billion acquisition of its core business in 2017 ended Yahoo's life as an independent company.
AltaVista (Wikimedia Commons) · Public domain (below threshold of originality; trademark applies) · Commons ↗ Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) launched AltaVista, a search engine developed jointly by its Western Research Lab and Palo Alto research arm. The multi-threaded crawler 'Scooter' paired with the 'TurboVista' back-end indexed roughly 16 million pages at launch, drew 300,000 hits on day one, and peaked at about 80 million queries per day in 1997. Unlike Yahoo!'s contemporaneous directory, AltaVista delivered full-text search over the entire page body — the first such service to do so at scale. It was also a showcase for DEC's 64-bit Alpha servers. Compaq acquired DEC in 1998, Overture bought AltaVista for US$140 million in 2003, Yahoo absorbed Overture later that year, and the service was finally shut down on 8 July 2013.
Stanford graduate students Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded the search company built around PageRank—an algorithm that estimated importance from the link structure of the web. Where the leading engines of the day (Yahoo!, AltaVista, Excite) depended on human directories and keyword matching, Google's ranking was fully algorithmic and its interface stripped to a single screen. It became a leading search engine within six months.
- Related organizations
- Appears in
- A General History of Information Technology · A History of the Internet and the Web
2000s
01 events
DuckDuckGo (Wikimedia Commons) · Public domain (below threshold of originality; trademark applies) · Commons ↗ Gabriel Weinberg launched DuckDuckGo from Paoli, Pennsylvania — a privacy-first search engine that does not log IP addresses, search histories, or personal profiles. Built solo from his home in early 2008, it had its commercial launch on 25 September 2008. Through the 2010s it established the position of 'the alternative to Google for users who object to tracking'. By the 2020s it was serving around 100 million queries a day, holding roughly 1.8% of the US search market and about 3 billion queries a month worldwide. It became a built-in choice in Apple Safari and Mozilla Firefox from 2014, and shipped its own privacy-first browser in 2018.
2010s
01 events
Daniel Voigt Godoy (Wikimedia Commons) · CC BY 4.0 · Commons ↗ Jacob Devlin and colleagues at Google AI posted BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) to arXiv. By pretraining a Transformer encoder bidirectionally as a masked-language model, it rewrote scores on GLUE and other NLP benchmarks at a stroke, and established the 'pretrain-then-fine-tune' paradigm that underlies every modern LLM. With the autoregressive GPT family, it forms one of the two great currents of Transformer-based language modelling.
- Related organizations
- Appears in
- A History of Artificial Intelligence
2020s
04 events
Perplexity AI / Alisperic (Wikimedia Commons) · Public domain (below threshold of originality; trademark applies) · Commons ↗ Perplexity AI — founded in San Francisco by Aravind Srinivas, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho and Andy Konwinski — launched its answer-style search engine, combining an LLM with real-time web search. The launch came just seven days after ChatGPT's debut on 30 November 2022, and it presented, ahead of the incumbents, what would become the standard form of modern AI search: an LLM grounded in retrieved web content, with footnoted citations on every answer. The design — using web search to anchor LLM output against fabrication — was first deployed at scale by Perplexity. By early 2026 its Series E-6 round valued the company at about US$21.2 billion; monthly active users were around 45 million, and Perplexity handled 780 million queries in May 2025 alone.
Hstoops / Microsoft (Wikimedia Commons) · Public domain (below threshold of originality; trademark applies) · Commons ↗ Microsoft unveiled 'New Bing'—Bing search with GPT-4-based chat integrated—and announced its plans to bring Copilot to Microsoft 365 in the same period. Only two months after the ChatGPT launch, this brought LLMs into the central battlefronts of search and productivity software at once, and triggered the industry-wide pivot to 'how do we integrate an LLM into our existing product?'. Google announced Bard the following day in response.
- Related organizations
- Microsoft Corporation · OpenAI
- Appears in
- A History of Artificial Intelligence · A History of Microsoft
OpenAI (Wikimedia Commons) · Public domain (below threshold of originality; trademark applies) · Commons ↗ OpenAI unveiled SearchGPT, an AI-search prototype, to a hand-picked 10,000-user preview. It was the trailer for the search feature later integrated into ChatGPT: LLM-written natural-language answers paired with real-time web results and source links. On 31 October 2024 the feature became GA as 'ChatGPT Search' for ChatGPT Plus and Team. On 16 December 2024 it opened to logged-in free users, and from 5 February 2025 it became available to all users wherever ChatGPT is available. It marked the point at which OpenAI entered the search market through its own user surface, opening a three-front contest against Google's incumbent dominance, Perplexity's specialist lead, and Microsoft Copilot's Bing-backed integration.
Google AI Overviews / uploaded by Alza08 (Wikimedia Commons) · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Commons ↗ At Google I/O in May, Google rolled out LLM-generated 'AI Overviews' atop search results across the United States. In parallel, Perplexity AI (founded 2022) grew rapidly as an 'answer engine', and OpenAI formally launched ChatGPT Search in 2025. The transition from 'search that sends you to links' to 'answer engines that show the answer directly' began in earnest, with structural consequences for publishers, the SEO industry, and online advertising. Shortly after AI Overviews launched, headline-grabbing hallucinations—'put glue on pizza', 'eat rocks'—made LLM hallucination a household problem.
- Related organizations
- Appears in
- A History of the Internet and the Web