The Search Wars
Sichuan Zhongshuge Store
No one remembers the Search Wars! Dang!
They occurred between 1997 – 2003 or so. It was a time when a dominant search engine, Google, had not yet risen to power. Multiple search engines vied for top spot. What was top spot, you say? It was “most pages indexed”.
How were the Wars fought? Each week, researchers would depth-check each search engine. Back then Yahoo was really the one folks thought would win, AskJeeves was in there, I think some Microsoft ones were in there.
Method:
They would search for something that does not exist. The results, therefore, would contain the entire pool of sites that the search engine HAD indexed and said, essentially, NOPE, not there, we don’t have that and we’ve checked everywhere.
How do you search for something that does not exist? Easy. Put your fingers over a keyboard and starting hitting keys.
Example:
fhdakfjklpoiovpoie
That ^ does not exist.
A return number on that from a search engine (yes, they used to return numbers, not today’s hopeless signal of ‘Next: 2, 3, 4,…27 million’) would tell you how many total web pages that engine had indexed. It was tracked week to week.
Yes, Google eventually won the Search Wars.
But even now, there are pockets that Google just can’t get to. See below.
Good hunting, Rebels.