The history of search engines actually began with paper directories such as the Yellow Pages. Directories like Yahoo are really just online Yellow Pages. If you think about it, the only difference between Yahoo and the Yellow pages is that Yahoo is online and you press buttons, while the Yellow Pages are in a book and you flip pages to search through them. In both, you go to sections such as hockey and there are lists. The computerized search engine is just an online improvement from the paper based Yellow Pages.

The history of online search engines began in April 1994. There were two guys named David Filo and Jerry Yang. They were Ph.D. candidates in electrical engineering at Stanford University. They built the first search engine to organize their personal interests on the Internet. They found it was fun searching the Internet like that because it was so easy and they would not have to remember all of the addresses. They named their search engine Yahoo! Yahoo stands for yet another hierarchical officious oracle, which is what they considered themselves (I think they just thought it was a cool name and made up words afterwards for it).

Still in 1994 they converted Yahoo into a customized database designed to serve the needs of the thousands of users of that began to use the Internet. From those two guys Yahoo has grown to become the most popular search engine on the web. Recently, it has improved to become a “portal” to the Internet, which is a starting gate for anything you want to do on the Internet. Other companies have caught go on to this and built search engines of their own. Some of the most popular are Alta Vista, WebCrawler, Infoseek, Lycos, Excite and Hotbot.