History Search Engines - WebCrawler

WebCrawler – Born in 1994

 WebCrawler was the first search engine to provide full text search. In 1994, Brian Pinkerton, a Computer Science and Engineering student at the University of Washington, used his spare time to create WebCrawler. With WebCrawler, Brian generated a list of the Top 25 websites on March 15, 1994. Only a month later on April 20, 1994, Brian announced the release of WebCrawler live on the web with a database of 4000 websites. On June 11, 1994, Brian posted to the Usenet group comp.infosystems.announce that the WebCrawler Index was available for searching. By November 14, 1994, WebCrawler served its one millionth query. By the end of the year, WebCrawler signed two sponsors, DealerNet and Starwave providing needed capital to finance WebCrawler. A little less than a year later, WebCrawler was fully operating on advertising revenue.

 A young America Online, without access to the web, acquired WebCrawler on June 1, 1995. On September 4, 1995, Spidey was created as WebCrawler’s mascot. On April 1, 1997 (no fooling), WebCrawler was sold by AOL to Excite. Initially, WebCrawler was going to run by its own dedicated team within Excite, but eventually the two were merged together on the same back end. In 2001, Excite went bankrupt and was purchased by InfoSpace. As part of the agreement, InfoSpace acquired WebCrawler. Today, InfoSpace runs WebCrawler as a meta-search tool blending results from Google, Yahoo!, Live Search (formerly MSN Search), Ask, About.com, MIVA, LookSmart, and others. As for Spidey, he is now purple.