We take search engines for granted these days. They exist because they have to. Without them, going through and finding relevant information in the millions and millions of pages that exist on the web would be an almost impossible task.

For example, it would have been extremely time-consuming for us here at Pingdom to put together this blog entry if we couldn’t easily search the web for the information we needed.

Above: The big three. Or…?

Here are nine things you probably didn’t know about search engines.

1. Invented in 1936?

The basic idea that would lead to the invention of hypertext and the reasoning behind the need for quick information retrieval of such stored information (the equivalent of today’s search engines) was published way back in 1945 by Vannevar Bush, an American engineer and science administrator. The essay, As We May Think, may have been written as early as 1936. His concept of a “memory extender” device, a memex, contains pioneering thoughts that ultimately led to the creation of the WWW.

2. A magic, automatic retriever of text

The first actual search engine was created in the 1960s by Gerard Salton. He and his team at Cornell University created the “SMART information retrieval system” (SMART stood for Salton’s Magic Automatic Retriever of Text). Gerard Salton is considered the father of modern search technology.

3. First on the internet

The first internet search engine was called Archie, made to index FTP archives. The name Archie is just Archive with the “v” removed.

4. First on the WWW

The first web search engine was called Wandex. It was released in 1993 and used an index created by the first web crawler, World Wide Web Wanderer, written in Perl by Matthew Gray at MIT. Matthew Gray now works at Google.

5. Not much to do

In December of 1993 there were only 623 websites on the internet, which made work for the first web search engines a lot easier than today, when there are more than 162 million websites on the internet.

6. First full text search

WebCrawler was the first search engine that indexed entire pages, and therefore the first to provide full text search like today’s search engines. It launched in 1994. Before then the search engines had only indexed page titles and header information. Today WebCrawler has transformed into a meta search engine, using results from Google, Yahoo, Live search, and others.

7. The Proto-Google

The technology that would become Google was originally called BackRub, a project Larry Page and Sergey Brin started working on in 1996.

8. Yahoo and Microsoft late in the game

Yahoo and Microsoft didn’t have their own search engine technology until 2004. Yahoo Search used data from AltaVista and Inktomi, and was even powered by Google for a while. Microsoft’s MSN Search (now Live Search) followed a similar path (but didn’t use Google) and didn’t launch their own technology until early in 2005 (beta in 2004).

9. The big three – NOT

Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are usually considered the “big three” in search, but this is actually incorrect, at least if you consider the total number of searches world wide. Baidu, the Chinese search engine, surpasses Microsoft’s Live Search in the number of searches made… which would make Google, Yahoo and Baidu the big three.

What do Android, Visio, Flash, Hotmail, Google Analytics and Powerpoint all have in common? Can you guess?

The answer is: None of them were created by the companies who now own them. They were acquisitions.

These products have continued to develop at their new homes, but the seed of innovation that sparked an actual, new product came from the outside. The key word here is innovation.

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We all know Google is huge and their wide range of services are bound to have a fair share of competitors, but you may be surprised just how wide-ranging Google considers its competition to be.

Here below we have included a quote from Google’s latest SEC filing with some very interesting information about what Google has to say about its competition.

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Big sites and services like Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter and many others rely heavily on open source software to run their operations. Happily, this isn’t a one-way street. They are also giving back to the open source community, not just by contributing to existing projects, but sometimes by open sourcing their own internal projects, giving back something completely new.

And what these popular sites can contribute is often quite valuable. Since they tend to be very large, they run big operations and have been forced to create solutions for scalability and performance problems that most other sites simply don’t have to deal with.

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Think about the software you use day to day. Depending on your profession and interests, what you use will vary, but some applications tend to show up over and over again. Microsoft Word and Excel, Powerpoint, Photoshop, various web browsers like Internet Explorer and Firefox, Skype, iTunes, and so on.

When it comes to those widely used, highly established desktop applications, think about how long it’s been since they first saw the light of day. Many of them are practically ancient.

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Is Facebook taking the first steps towards making itself an internet-wide payment platform?

You may know that the company is working on something it calls Facebook Credits (it’s in beta). You can buy Facebook Credits with a credit card or Paypal, and then use these credits as a currency when buying virtual items from applications on the Facebook platform (Facebook apps). A number of apps already use it.

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