The Evolution of the Search Engine

Omar Zahran
7 min readApr 5, 2020
Image Credit: Johannes Plenio via Unsplash

The evolution of things is something that will occur naturally. It is not something that we can stop. As long as we as a human society do not come to an absolute standstill, there will continue to be progress filled with peaks, valleys, and trends. Certain things that were popular become less popular and then used for other purposes. Thinking about this makes me think, oddly enough, about search engines. The evolution of the search engine since the heyday of Yahoo search and the rise of Google search to now has been a phenomenal transformation. So much so that the simple search engine, the gateway to the internet, has become so much more than that and has also started to eliminate the need for several services on our mobile devices. Let’s take a look at what the search engine was then and what it has become today.

Image Credit: Matthew M via Unsplash

Humble Desktop Beginnings

Most people’s first interaction with a search engine was probably on a desktop or laptop computer. Navigating the web browser to Bing, Google, or Yahoo and then searching for whatever website or topic that came to mind. It was a very simple concept: the internet was a vast but very messy place and the search engine helped organize the chaos…

--

--

Omar Zahran

Freelance sports writer fascinated by the stories that our favorite teams and athletes present to us