A short history of the search engine

In 1230, French Cardinal Hugues de Saint-Cher (and 500 of his colleagues) completed the first search engine. The Washington Post’s Brian Palmer has a neat piece on the evolution of search tools since. Money quote:

Brin and Page’s billion-dollar realization was that users would rather see a reputable page that matched their query reasonably well than an obscure page that matched perfectly.

These innovations remain the backbone of today’s search engines, from Google and Yahoo to Bing and others. But the Web is changing at a staggering pace. The 1994 index for Lycos, one of the Web’s first search engines, had only 54,000 pages. To put the proliferation of electronic data in perspective, humankind had generated 5 trillion megabytes of data by the year 2003. We now produce that volume every two days.

Hat tip: Research Buzz