The changing face of search

THE INFORMATION AGE has created a rich variety of content on the internet and has provided a plethora of categories and types of content to choose from.

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Just as the users were beginning to wonder how they are going to be able to cope with such depth and breadth of content, search engines started emerging and have made the search process simpler and more focussed.

Search engines evolved from file indexes to keyword matchers. Then came along the link-based rankers following which intent-aware AI systems have emerged to address the search needs. While there were several search engines that emerged from time to time like Archie, Aliweb, Lycos and Yahoo and Altavista, the arrival of Google in 1998 created a paradigm shift. It started to rank pages based on backlink, automated relevance and continuously improved the results. Subsequently, Google established itself as a reliable source for searches.