The use of search engines only became commonplace with the advent of Yahoo! in the mid-1990s.
The idea of search, however, dates back to a 1945 article by Vannevar Bush entitled “As We May Think”; published in “The Atlantic”.
In the article Bush implored scientists to work together to build a body of knowledge for all mankind.
He proposed the idea of a virtually limitless, fast, reliable, extensible, associative memory storage and retrieval system.
He named this device a memex.
The first web search engine was Archie, created in 1990 by Alan Emtage, a student at McGill University in Montreal.
Google – the undisputed king (or queen?) of search – began in 1996 as a research project by Stanford University Ph.D. students Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
“Search” has become indispensable to our way of live.
The Money Show’s Bruce Whitfield interviewed Google SA Director Luke Mckend about the fascinating science of search for his weekly “The Science Of” feature.
Listen to the interview in the audio below (and/or scroll down for quotes from it).
All of the pages that Google indexes represent 100 million gigabytes. Too many zeros to count!
— Luke Mckend, Google SA
If you ask bad questions you’ll get bad results.
— Luke Mckend, Google SA
Make sure that the keywords you use define the parameters of what you’re looking for.
— Luke Mckend, Google SA
If you’re logged into Google we provide you with contextual results based on what you’ve searched for previously.
— Luke Mckend, Google SA
Artificial intelligence is playing an enormous role in how these services evolve.
— Luke Mckend, Google SA
Voice search in the US is tripling year-on-year.
— Luke Mckend, Google SA
Search is becoming more predictive.
— Luke Mckend, Google SA
Personalisation is the future.
— Luke Mckend, Google SA
Access to information raises all sorts of ethical considerations.
— Luke Mckend, Google SA
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