What was the first ever search engine?

Last updated: August 16, 2024

Most of us remember when the internet was basically just clicking through thousands of indexed links on Yahoo! until you found something interesting. You could still discover a lot of things, but at that time we didn’t even know what we were searching for. The internet wasn’t a place you came to with a question, it was a place you came to just to look around.

And then the search engine came along. 

But it wasn’t like one day it just showed up and we all started looking up whether that spot on our shoulder could be melanoma. Figuring out how to get a computer to understand search queries was a huge challenge, not to mention indexing all those web pages. 

Someone had to get things started, even if it was rudimentary at first. What was the first search engine?

Click START below to answer.