Detailed · 9 events
A History of Search Engines
1990s
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 hits 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.
- EVT.003T2Google FoundedA History of the Internet and the WebA General History of Information Technology
2000s
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
2020s
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.
- EVT.007T1New Bing and Microsoft Copilot — LLMs Enter SearchA History of Artificial IntelligenceA History of MicrosoftRead more →
- EVT.008T1AI Eats Search — Google AI Overviews and the Rise of PerplexityA History of the Internet and the WebRead more →
OpenAI (Wikimedia Commons) · Public domain (below threshold of originality; trademark applies) · Commons ↗ OpenAI unveiled SearchGPT as an explicitly 'temporary prototype' of AI search, opened through a waitlist to a small test group — and said in the same post that it planned to fold the best of it into ChatGPT, so it was never meant to ship as a standalone product. The interface paired LLM-written natural-language answers with real-time web results and in-line source links. On 31 October 2024 the feature launched as 'ChatGPT search' for Plus, Team and SearchGPT waitlist users; on 16 December 2024 it reached logged-in free users; and from 5 February 2025 chatgpt.com served it without a sign-in. 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.