It’s hard to believe, but in the very early days of the internet, there were no search engines. You had to know exactly where you wanted to go, and there was nothing to help you find any information.

Websites as we know them today did not exist either. Instead, there were simply computer networks. In order to make sense of these networks and enable people to find them, early internet pioneers decide there should be an index and created lists of all the existing networks.

The worked for a while, but you still had to know how to find the lists. The earliest versions of these indexes were actually stored on disks that had to be inserted into the computer. Eventually, the number of networks grew so fast that it became nearly impossible to keep the lists current.

By the early 1990 s, the first searching utility was created. The technology of the time let users search a database of static sites and text documents. A few years later, the first web robot created lists of websites now in the familiar URL format.

The next few years saw improvements in search technology, enabling users to see both lists of sites organized by category and brief descriptions of the sites. Rather than providing simple lists, search methods focused on relevancy and contextual relationships to find appropriate sites. Competition of hundreds of companies contributed to the development of search engines as they attempted to outperform each other by providing improved results.

When home internet access soared in 1996, search technology became even more sophisticated and competitive. Search companies sought to capitalize on the vast number of people on the internet, and began charging sites to be listed as well as selling advertising. The money-making ability of search engines attracted investors and speculators, creating the dot-com boom and the efficient and accurate search engines that we know today.