History of Search Engines Timeline

Excite, initially called Architext, was started by six Stanford undergraduates in February 1993. Their project was fully funded by mid-1993, laying the groundwork for what would become a major commercial search engine.

The first product from Yahoo!, founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo in January 1994, was a Web directory called Yahoo! Directory. In April 1994, the two Stanford PhD candidates had created some pages that became relatively popular.

Image source: Yahoo!

At Carnegie Mellon University during July 1994, Michael Mauldin, on leave from CMU, developed the Lycos search engine. Lycos launched in 1994 and became a major commercial endeavor.

Image source: Lycos

Excite was the first serious commercial search engine, launching in 1995 after being started by six Stanford undergraduates in February 1993 under the name Architext.

In 1995, a search function was added to Yahoo!, allowing users to search Yahoo! Directory rather than only browsing its hand-categorized listings.

In 1996, Netscape was looking to give a single search engine an exclusive deal as the featured search engine on Netscape's web browser, highlighting the growing commercial value of search traffic.

Image source: Netscape Navigator

In 1996, Robin Li developed the RankDex site-scoring algorithm for search engines results page ranking and received a US patent for the technology. It was the first search engine that used hyperlinks to measure the quality of websites it was indexing, predating Google's very similar patent filed two years later in 1998.

Image source: Baidu

Google adopted the idea of selling search terms in 1998 from a small search engine company named goto.com, a business model that would become central to Google's advertising revenue.

Image source: Go.com

Microsoft first launched MSN Search in the fall of 1998 using search results from Inktomi. In early 1999, the site began to display listings from Looksmart blended with results from Inktomi, and for a short time in 1999 it used results from AltaVista instead.

Many search engine companies were caught up in the dot-com bubble, a speculation-driven market boom that peaked in March 2000, dramatically affecting the fortunes of numerous search businesses.

Image source: Dot-com bubble

In 2001 Excite and @Home went bankrupt following the collapse of the dot-com bubble, and InfoSpace bought Excite for $10 million, marking the end of one of the earliest major commercial search engines.

Image source: Excite (web portal)

Yahoo! acquired Inktomi in 2002, gaining control of the search technology that had powered many search services including MSN Search and Yahoo!'s own search offerings.

Image source: Inktomi

Yahoo! acquired Overture in 2003, which owned AlltheWeb and AltaVista, consolidating several pioneering search technologies under Yahoo!'s ownership.

Image source: Yahoo Native

In 2004, Microsoft began a transition to its own search technology, powered by its own web crawler called msnbot, moving away from reliance on third-party providers like Inktomi and AltaVista.

Image source: Microsoft Bing

Yahoo! switched to Google's search engine until 2004, when it launched its own search engine based on the combined technologies of its acquisitions of Inktomi and Overture.

Microsoft's rebranded search engine, Bing, was launched on June 1, 2009, replacing Live Search and marking Microsoft's most serious challenge to Google's dominance in search.

Image source: Microsoft Bing

On July 29, 2009, Yahoo! and Microsoft finalized a deal in which Yahoo! Search would be powered by Microsoft Bing technology, creating a combined competitor to Google in the search market.

Around 2000, Google's search engine rose to prominence, beginning its ascent toward becoming the world's dominant search engine. By 2000, Yahoo! was also providing search services based on Inktomi's search engine.

From 2007 the Google.com search engine has allowed users to filter by date by clicking 'Show search tools' in the leftmost column of the initial search results page, and then selecting the desired date range.

Concern has been raised that search engines such as Google and Bing provide customized results based on the user's activity history, leading to what has been termed echo chambers or filter bubbles by Eli Pariser in 2011.

Image source: Filter bubble

As of 2019, active search engine crawlers include those of Baidu, Bing, Brave, Google, DuckDuckGo, Gigablast, Mojeek, Sogou and Yandex, showing a diverse ecosystem of companies indexing the web.

As of January 2022, Google is by far the world's most used search engine, with a market share of 90%, while the world's other most used search engines were Bing at 4%, Yandex at 2%, and Yahoo! at 1%.

In 2024, Google's dominance was ruled an illegal monopoly in a case brought by the US Department of Justice, a landmark antitrust decision challenging the company's grip on the search market.

Image source: United States v. Google LLC (2020)

May 2025 marked the first time in over a decade that Google's share has fallen below the 90% threshold. As of May 2025, according to StatCounter, Google held approximately 89–90% of worldwide search share, with Bing (~4%), Yandex (~2.5%), Yahoo! (~1.3%), DuckDuckGo (~0.8%), and Baidu (~0.7%) trailing far behind.

Image source: Google Search

Li later used his RankDex technology for the Baidu search engine, which was founded by him in China and launched in 2000. Baidu went on to become the leading search engine in China.

Google remains inaccessible in mainland China due to long-standing censorship issues, having exited the Chinese market in 2010 following disputes over censorship and cybersecurity, leaving Baidu as the dominant player there.

ImHalal came online in September 2011, offering a search engine tailored to Islamic values that filtered out content deemed haram for its users.

Image source: ImHalal

Halalgoogling came online in July 2013, another faith-oriented search engine designed to filter results according to Islamic guidelines.

Image source: Halalgoogling

As of Kakao's merger with Daum in 2014, domestic search engines controlled almost all of the South Korean market, with local players dominating over foreign competitors like Google.

Image source: Kakao

As of late 2023, search engine market shares in Russia and East Asia have remained relatively stable but with some notable shifts due to geopolitical and technological developments. In China, Baidu remains the leading search engine with a market share of about 59.3% as of early 2024.

As of Kakao's spinoff of Daum in 2025, Daum's market share in South Korea had sunk below that of Google and Bing, reflecting the erosion of domestic search dominance in the country.

Image source: Daum (web portal)

In July 2026, Google overtook Naver's monthly active user count in South Korea, a symbolic milestone in the shift of the Korean search market away from domestic incumbents.

Image source: Naver