What is the exchange rate from USD to Euro right now? And what is the recipe for these delicious cookies again? Google and other search engines provide the answer to all of these questions in seconds. But how did this actually happen and why do search engines generally exist?
Admittedly, the question seems a bit philosophical. A simple answer is: To find something. In a sea of over a billion websites on the World Wide Web, a search engine definitely serves its purpose. And new websites are added every day. Others disappear from the scene completely unnoticed. This complicates the initial situation. Because the Internet we know – the World Wide Web – works like a living system in which things change every second. In order to find what you are looking for in a digital organism, you need search engines.
The first search engine was called “Archie”
The most popular search engine today is called Google. For some Internet users, the name epitomizes search engines in general. There are many others like Bing or DuckDuckGo. And even before Google, there were search engines like Altavista and Lycos.
Like the World Wide Web itself, the idea for a search engine comes from an academic environment. In 1990, researchers at McGill University in Montreal were still using “Archie”.
Archie is considered the first official search engine and searches for files and folders in FTP directories, i.e. server databases. Archie cannot search texts for keywords. That’s why FTP search engines are now only used by universities to search scientific data sets in a targeted manner.
Find known information
Search engines like Google and Co. naturally have full-text search capabilities. But this method has now also been refined. In the past, Internet users searched for specific pages using keywords or keywords. However, the search results did not always provide the desired content.
At the end of the 2000s, keyword search gave resourceful marketing people the idea of creating specially designed websites in which a specific keyword appears in almost every sentence. These keyword islands have done a lot of harm to internet searches. Because suddenly completely meaningless websites appear in the top rankings.
Search engine providers responded quickly. Keyword islands are now extinct. In addition, the changing online behavior of users and the mass distribution of smartphones have further changed internet searches.
Thanks to audio search, keywords have become obsolete. Today people search for relevant content in complete sentences. As a result, the overall search results have also improved significantly.
Research little-known things
However, search engines are not just used to find something that is already known, such as company websites or the names of actors. Search engines now serve as an important research tool, especially for media professionals.
This involves content that is scattered across many websites. This is the case when little information is currently publicly known about a topic. Search engines help to track down these isolated finds on the web.
This means that search engines indirectly provide new content. Because as knowledge about a topic grows, new websites emerge and thus new discoverable content.
Not everything is found
Search engines are a powerful tool for finding suitable content from the incredibly large number of websites. But even Google doesn’t discover every piece of content.
Like the moon, the internet also has a dark side. The so-called Darknet is a playground for hackers, nerds and content that is usually criminally relevant. Of course, this area of the internet does not want to be found and therefore does not appear in any search results.
E-mails, chat histories, internet telephony or content that is deliberately not indexed are also not part of the database of a search engine. Not indexed? If websites are under construction or only serve internal purposes, site operators put the nofollow command in the website’s source code. The content is already invisible to search engines.
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Does AI have the potential to replace search engines?
Artificial intelligence (AI) will continue to transform search engines. Big players like Google and Bing are already experimenting with AI-assisted search. However, the results are not yet satisfactory.
AI-assisted search maps randomly found data and spreads false information without actual factual knowledge. There is no curation. As long as this is the case, traditional searches with a selection of sources remain essential as a fact check.
However, in the future, AI will help make search queries even more personal, for example by asking questions. The search can then be customized directly by the user. The search for results is much more accurate; AI as a personal search assistant.
If we look further ahead, internet searches will continue to change due to technical developments. From today’s perspective, there is still no end in sight for search engines.