When the World Wide Web surged into existence during the 1990s, we were introduced to the problem of how to actually find something in this ever-ballooning construction zone that easily outpaced even the fastest post-WW2 urban sprawl. Although domain names provided a way to find servers using DNS rather than having to mash in IP addresses, you still somehow had to know the relevant URL.
A range of solutions were thought up over time, ranging from printed Yellow Pages type guides, to online curated lists of resources, as well as things like web rings where one website would link to a relevant similar website. This was the time when word-of-mouth was also very relevant, with people proudly announcing their own website on Geocities or other hosting service.
Search engines already existed long before the WWW became the hot new thing during the 1990s, but it was the WWW that would really push them to their limits. As anyone who used search engines for the WWW can attest, they had many issues. Often you’d end up using multiple search engines to find something, and despite fierce competition between web search engines to become the starting page for their browser, actually finding things on the WWW remained a tough problem.
Since a web search engine ‘just’ has to index the WWW and match a search query against the results, why was this such a hard problem that persisted until Google apparently cracked the code?
Continue reading “How Search Engines Enabled Finding Needles In A WWW-Sized Haystack”
