History of the development of Internet search engines. History of search engines. Contextual advertising service – Bing Ads
Which search engine was the first in RuNet? Yandex, Aport or Rambler?
The very first search engines of the Runet (of which, according to one of the founders of Rambler, there were 2 or 3) very quickly sank into oblivion. Among them were morphological extensions to the AltaVista system, which did not leave us their names. Therefore, we will have to choose from those who remain:
Rambler
The creation of Rambler began in 1996, when there were only a few dozen sites in the Russian segment of the Internet. Development was completed by the fall of that year. The domain rambler.ru was registered on September 26, and October 8, 1996, on the birthday of one of the creators, Rambler was opened to users.
Rambler - the very first search engine in Runet of those currently existing.
The Aport search engine was developed by February 1996, but at that time it searched only on the site russia.agama.com. Gradually the number of sites grew and towards the official opening November 11, 1997 year, “Aport” was already searched on 10,000 sites. Thus, “Aport” was one of the first search engines on the RuNet, but due to the limited search range it cannot be considered the oldest.
Yandex
CompTek, the company that developed Yandex, was founded in 1989. In 1993, CompTek developed Yandex, a hard drive search program. In 1996, the program added the ability to search the Web. The first one was written in 1997 search robot, indexed by Runet and September 23, 1997 The official presentation of Yandex took place.
CompTek's Yandex is not the oldest, but their search technologies and research in linguistics and morphology are the oldest in Russia.
The history of the development of the Russian Internet (Runet) officially dates back to 1994. It was then that the domain zone.ru was registered, and the first sites began to appear, many of which subsequently grew into popular portals.
The Moshkov Library, the RosBusinessConsulting information agency, Artemy Lebedev’s studio - all these resources were founded in the mid-90s of the last century.
How the first search engines appeared
For quite a long time, the “population” of the Runet was limited to a small number of these pioneers network technologies. There were so few of them that the concept of “search” simply did not exist in those days.
Most of the necessary sites could be saved in browser bookmarks, and for the rest there were directories where all the links were grouped into several main categories. The first such catalog was the Russia on the Net project (http://www.ru), a little later DMOZ, Yahoo and Yandex.Catalogue appeared.
However, over time, the number of Internet users increased, and the number of sites created so that these users could visit them and obtain the information they needed became larger.
Gradually, catalog databases grew so large that it became very difficult to find anything manually. Then the idea arose to automate the search process and create a specialized interactive service for this.
Demand always gives rise to supply, so search projects from different authors began to appear on the Internet one after another. Some of them, such as WebCrawler, Lycos, InfoSeek and others, were unable to achieve any serious success and after some time died in obscurity on the vast expanses of the World Wide Web.
But for other, more successful companies, everything turned out much better - the leading modern developers of search technologies were formed during this period and over the past years have managed to achieve stunning results.
What is a search engine
A modern search engine is a complex mechanism that requires enormous resources (both human and material) to support current work and sustainable development.
The formation of search results is based on the notorious ranking formula, which takes into account hundreds of different factors, from the internal structure of the site and the texts of its pages to external links, the attractiveness of commercial offers posted on the resource, and the behavioral characteristics of users who switched to it from a search.
Back in 2006-2007, Yandex representatives stated that an entire research institute was needed to decipher their algorithm, because their search was based on taking into account more than 800 different factors. Years have passed since then, the ranking formula has become several orders of magnitude more complex, and the factors that have the greatest impact on search results have become almost impossible to influence.
So behind the external simplicity home page and the quick reaction of Yandex or Google to the search phrase you entered hides the painstaking work of thousands of people and huge financial investments in infrastructure, equipment and human resources.
At the same time, it is obvious that the leading companies today have secured such superiority over those who want to compete with them at least in some way that the price of entry to this market is measured in billions of dollars.
This state of affairs can be confirmed by the history of attempts to penetrate search market the most famous and richest software company Microsoft. Its Bing search engine has been positioned as a serious competitor to leading players for more than a decade, for which huge amounts of money have been invested in it.
And only in recent years have these investments begun to produce the first results, although they can still be called satisfactory only with a very great exaggeration: Bing’s share in the Russian market at the time of writing was less than one percent.
Another example that well illustrates the conclusions made earlier is the Russian search engine Nigma. Its creators chose a niche marketing strategy. Apparently, well aware that in the open field of general search it is almost impossible to compete with the pillars of the market, the developers of the algorithm took the path of providing search services for educational structures in the field of chemistry, mathematics, physics and other sciences.
However, the target audience of such a project is obviously small, which is clearly reflected in its attendance: according to the Liveinternet counter, the number of users of this system is only one tenth of one percent.
- The undisputed leader in the ranking is Yandex. According to the same counter, Yandex has a “controlling stake” in the search engine market: in July 2014, the search engine share was more than 52%.
- Google confidently took second place with 38%.
- Third place by a fairly large margin is taken by the mail.ru portal. Some time ago, a popular site was apparently looking for an older brother to whom it could sell at a higher price - the Yandex and Google engines were alternately integrated into their search platform. But since 2013, the company has set a course for independent development, and now the site implements a search algorithm of its own design. True, this did not in any way affect the system’s market share, which, apparently, is determined mainly by the promotion of the brand and the attractiveness of the services presented on the site. Over the past years, traffic to the go.mail.ru service has fluctuated around 7%.
All other search engines, including the once powerful Rambler, can only be regarded as a natural background - they all do not have a significant impact on the distribution of places in the top search engines, being at the level of 0.1-0.7 percent of the market.
Analysis of the Russian Internet search market
The search engine market in Russia is very specific. To describe it, two characteristics can be used: concentrated and weakly competitive. Indeed, the share of the three main players exceeds 97%, which indicates their overwhelming advantage over all others.
The Russian search engine Yandex has a dominant position. As we have already said, its share exceeds 50%. In this, our country is unique: only here, in China and in the Czech Republic, national search engines provide tangible competition to the global giant - Google.
By number of processed search queries Yandex ranks fourth in the world. Moreover, if Google’s first place in this list can hardly be questioned, then the second place Chinese Baidu caused only by the huge population of this country. Third place goes to Yahoo, which currently has a two-fold advantage over the Russian monopolist.
According to the rules of the European market, Yandex can indeed be called a monopolist - such a definition is assigned there to any company whose market share exceeds 35%.
In our country, this state of affairs is called dominance and is not punished until the fact of abuse of the existing advantage is proven. It is clear that in the Internet environment it is very difficult to confirm the fact of abuse.
How to determine the share of a search engine in total traffic
An objective assessment of this indicator is quite easy to obtain. The fact is that the vast majority of Russian sites have installed counters from the leading Internet statistics operator Liveinternet.
Of course, not all sites install these counters; moreover, the following link does not take into account the domain zones .su and рф. But still, the given sample can be considered quite representative; it takes into account all the main topics, regions and types of sites available today on the RuNet.
So, you can see the current state of affairs at the link: http://www.liveinternet.ru/stat/ru/searches.html?date=2014-07-31;period=... .
This is a complete summary of the number of visitors who went to sites registered to Russian users for June and July 2014.
The conclusions are obvious. We have already provided an analysis of the state of affairs in the previous section.
Characteristics of the main search engines in Russia
Yandex
The appearance of this search engine on the market very well illustrates the situation in the country at the time when it began to take on modern shape. It’s not for nothing that Yandex is called the mirror of the Runet - apparently, this definition can be expanded to objective reality.
The development of a company is in some ways very similar to the evolution of the entire society, so to some extent the national leader is a mirror of the entire country at the end of the 20th century.
In order to illustrate such a bold statement, let us briefly look at the history of the company and the Yandex search engine.
The times after perestroika are characterized by a serious reassessment of values by the most active part of society and the emergence of new energetic people in the political and business arena, united by the main idea in their lives: to modernize the living conditions of themselves and their country in order to ensure a decent standard of living for everyone who shares their beliefs.
One of the luminaries of that era is Arkady Volozh, who managed to unite around himself the best workaholic specialists who laid the foundation for the future search system.
Yandex would probably never have become a mirror of the Runet if not for the amazing instinct of Arkady Volozh, who was able to discern the main prospect of that time in the construction of a Russian search engine.
To implement his idea, he managed to redirect financial flows into this project generated from barter transactions for the exchange of batches of computers imported into our country in exchange for trains of Kuban pumpkin seeds.
Of course, big projects are not done without a team of like-minded people. And then the founder of Yandex was lucky - he managed to attract to his side the talented and very promising physicist Ilya Segalovich, whom he had known since school.
It is difficult to say what was the last straw that outweighed all prospects for a brilliant scientific career for the future great scientist. It may very well be that the real obsession and talent of persuasion of the permanent director of Yandex played a decisive role, but Ilya became the technical director of the company and made an invaluable contribution to its development.
It was he who became the author of the name and logo, which is now known to everyone who has ever visited the Internet. Segalovich became interested in the idea of morphological analysis of phrases in Russian and the possibility of classifying texts based on the rules for constructing grammatical structures.
As a result, the expression “Yet another index” appeared, which in an abbreviated version, thanks to the light hand of the search engine founders, became the word Yandex. Later, in order to emphasize the main purpose of the search engine - to search in the Russian-language segment of the Internet - the logo was transformed into Yandex.
Ilya Segalovich devoted his entire life to the formation and development of this project. Unfortunately, he passed away in 2013, but his work lives on; Yandex is increasing its superiority over competitors by constantly improving the search algorithm, the foundations of which were laid by his late director of technology and development.
The Google search engine was founded a year earlier than Yandex, but appeared on the Russian market only in 2004. Of course, over the years, Yandex has succeeded in adapting its search to the specifics of our country.
Despite the fact that quite a significant number of Internet users, in response to a question to which they do not know the answer, suggest “Google” rather than “ask Yandex,” the main problem of the global giant is the insufficient consideration of the morphology of Russian-language texts, as a result of which the answer to queries users is often incomplete or slightly distorted.
You can argue for a long time about whose search is better and which system provides more motivated (or “hot”) clients. But, it seems to us, the typical picture for a Russian user is as follows: first, a “Runet mirror” is requested, and if the search results are not relevant (and this, unfortunately, happens quite often), the request is retransmitted to Google.
Google's global updates occur much less frequently than Yandex's. But they change the search results so seriously that many authoritative sites that have been in the top for years find themselves at the bottom of the first hundred search results.
For example, latest version The Panda algorithm had a great impact on some leading online stores, even affecting the seemingly untouchable Amazon.com and others.
In 2013, the company finally stopped broadcasting other people’s searches on its site and implemented its own version of the search engine at go.mail.ru.
This step can only be welcomed, since in the future the search engine from mail.ru may provide serious resistance to the leadership duo, which for now can relax a little, without feeling the gusty breath of competitors behind its back.
The share of this search engine currently does not exceed 7%, but has a good prospect of increasing due to development social services provided by the company: Odnoklassniki, Moi Krug, mail, etc.
Search engines with less than 1% market share
This group contains mainly systems that have never been able to break into the elite of Russian search. Among them, the Rambler company occupies a special position, once confidently occupying second place and demonstrating very promising trends.
Rambler
Having appeared in 1996 as the brainchild of programmers from the science city of Pushchino under the leadership of the talented enthusiast Dmitry Kryukov, Rambler immediately became the leader in the search engine market. In those days, Yandex did not yet exist, and Google was just beginning its march across America and neighboring countries.
It would seem that such a head start should have helped the “tramp” (that is how the word Rambler is translated from English) to gain noticeable competitive advantages in development.
But either internal conflicts in the company, or the lack of a clearly defined strategy have led to the fact that Rambler now broadcasts Yandex search and is better known as an aggregator of some popular services, including the Rambler Top100 rating site.
Bing
Aka MSN Search, Live Seacrh, Windows Live Seacrh is a product of Microsoft, which is desperately fighting for a place in the sun in the search engine market. This is one of the few services that uses its own engine.
The search results are quite acceptable, the main problem of the site seems to be its low popularity among users.
Aport
Another example of the sad fate of what was once one of the market leaders. There were times when this search engine firmly held third place after Yandex and Rambler, and webmasters sought to get into its catalog as actively as in DMOZ or the Yandex catalogue.
Now the site hosts an online store of popular household goods. If search on aport remains, it is hidden somewhere in the depths of the resource, on one of its subdomains.
What you need to write your own search engine
In order to answer this question, you need to have a good understanding of what a search engine is and how it works. We have already partially examined the basic principles of constructing a formula for ranking sites in search results. In addition, the following points should be noted:
The main task of a search engine is to provide an answer to the user's request. The answer must be clear and relevant, otherwise the user will leave for other systems, even despite the low competition in this industry.
To give such an answer, the search algorithm needs, at the time of its formation, to scan the contents of many billions of pages on the Internet in search of the most suitable ones for a specific request. To do this, search engines create their own databases, called indexes, and store all the necessary information there.
The index is formed by constantly scanning the network in search of new sites that have appeared, as well as changes to already indexed pages. This work is carried out by special programs called indexing robots.
They visit websites around the clock and read updated information. Organizing the work of such robots requires building a large data center with several thousand powerful computers with all the infrastructure, starting from uninterruptible power supply and cooling to regular maintenance and upgrades.
Users want to receive quick and adequate answers to their queries. Therefore, a modern search engine must take into account not only the characteristics of the sites it knows, but also the preferences, behavioral characteristics and geographic location of each of its clients.
To do this, search algorithms must have elements of artificial intelligence and be able to learn independently in the process of their work. Obviously, to write such an engine you need a large team of top-class programmers.
Considering that the leading search engines have already solved all these problems and have all the necessary potential for further development, the cost of entering this market seems almost exorbitant.
Therefore, it is unlikely that a new player will appear in the near future, capable of quickly taking its rightful place among existing systems. Although, if this suddenly happens, everyone will benefit - both the search engines themselves, which will receive new incentives for even greater improvement, and we, capricious ordinary users, who are always missing something and want the search to become better and higher quality every day .
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In the early 90s, Internet users were not in the habit of asking search engines questions. Links to useful sites that we learned about mainly from friends were collected into separate text files. Later, directory sites appeared with categories that were replenished manually. Such, for example, were the Yahoo! and Virtual Library (VLib), which was maintained and stored on the CERN server by the inventor modern Internet Tim Berners-Lee.
The first search engine in history is considered to be Archie, which appeared in 1990, a file archive with downloadable site directories and the ability to search through them, created by students at McGill University in Montreal. Archie did not index the content of sites: search engines launched in 1993, including World Wide Web Wanderer, ALIWEB and JumpStation, learned this. The latter became the first full-fledged search engine in the modern sense: with the help of robots, it collected and ranked links in search results based on similarity to the user’s query.
Creators of the first search engines
for the most part or quit this job, or went to work
to large Internet companies
Introduced in 1994, AltaVista became the first search engine to work with natural language queries, and the first truly powerful search engine was WebCrawler, which indexed the entire content of pages. Finally, in 1997–1998, Google and Yandex, the most popular search engines in Russia today, launched. Thanks to better algorithms, they became an international and regional leader, respectively, but it took them time to take share from other market participants. The creators of the first search engines, for the most part, either quit this occupation or went to work for large Internet companies that bought their entire systems.
At the time when the development of the Internet was just beginning, the amount of available information was relatively small, and there were few Internet users. In the initial stages of the network's development, it was used by employees of universities and research laboratories to exchange information between institutions. At that time, searching for information on the Internet was not relevant, unlike today.
The first way to organize and systematize access to information resources was the creation of website directories. They began to group links according to specific topics.
The pioneer in the area was Yahoo, which appeared in April 1994. Over time, the number of sites increased and Yahoo added a directory search option. It was not a search engine in the truest sense, because the search scope was limited to directory resources.
Subsequently, catalogs spread and began to be used everywhere, but the Internet did not stand still, but continued to develop. Search methods also developed along with it. On this moment directories have almost lost popularity, this is explained by the fact that a modern directory, even if it contains a huge amount of resources, will only be able to provide access to a small part of the information that is contained on the network.
These days, the largest directory on the web is the Open Directory Project, or DMOZ, which contains information on 5 million resources, but this is relatively small when compared to, for example, Google's search engine, which contains about 8 billion documents.
A full-fledged search system was released only in 1994, it became the WebCrawler search system.
A year later, in 1995, the AltaVista and Lycos search engine projects appeared. One of them, AltaVista, in particular, held a leading position in the search field for many years.
Two years later, in 1997, Stanford University students Sergey Brin and Larry Page developed a search engine Google system, which is the leader in the search field today. 
This year was also the year when the creation of the Russian search engine Yandex was officially announced, which is still the leader in the Russian-language segment of the network.
At the moment, there are only 3 search engines that have reached the international level: MSN Search, Yahoo and Google. These systems have their own databases and search algorithms. Most other search engines use their results. So Mail.ru uses the Yandex database, search.aol.com uses Google, and Lycos, AltaVista and AllTheWeb use Yahoo.
The search leader on the Russian Internet at the moment is Yandex, followed by Rambler, followed by Google, Mail.ru, A port and KM.ru.
Search engines have different operating algorithms, and in order to take a good position in search results and attract targeted visitors, you need to know the features of SEO optimization for different search engines. For example
