Timeline of Search Engines, 1990 to 2026

By Bill Hartzer · Updated 19 August 2026

How to read this timeline

Search engine history is unusually badly dated, for three reasons that recur below. Companies and products have different birthdays: Excite's company was founded in June 1993 and its service launched in October 1995. Announcements and launches are different events: ALIWEB was announced in late 1993 and launched in May 1994. And brands outlive indexes — AllTheWeb stopped running its own index around 2003 but was not switched off until 2011, so one shutdown date describes the wrong thing. Where sources genuinely disagree, both dates are printed rather than averaged. Everything is checked as of 19 August 2026.

1990–1993 — before the web could be searched

10 September 1990 — Archie goes live at McGill University, built by Alan Emtage with Bill Heelan and Peter J. Deutsch. It indexes FTP filenames, not page content. Date conflict: McGill's own history and the Internet Hall of Fame both date its creation to 1989.
1991–1993 — Veronica and Jughead do the same job for Gopher, searching menu titles.
1992 — Bunyip Information Systems is founded to commercialise Archie; Martijn Koster builds the first version of ALIWEB, per Nexor.
June 1993 — Matthew Gray at MIT runs the World Wide Web Wanderer, generally called the first web robot; its index, Wandex, follows later that year. He built it to measure the web's growth, not to search it. Six Stanford students found Architext, which becomes Excite.
2 September 1993 — W3Catalog launches at the University of Geneva, assembled from existing hand-maintained link lists. Runs until 8 November 1996.
October/November 1993 — ALIWEB is announced.
12 December 1993 — JumpStation begins indexing at the University of Stirling; announced 21 December. First to combine crawling, indexing and searching.

1994–1995 — the first commercial engines

January 1994 — Infoseek founded in Sunnyvale and launched as a paid search service. It is discontinued that August and relaunched free in February 1995.
21 April 1994 — WebCrawler launches from the University of Washington with ~4,000 sites. First full-text web search engine. Its millionth query comes on 14 November 1994.
May 1994 — ALIWEB is presented at the first World Wide Web conference at CERN. Koster also authors robots.txt this year.
20 July 1994 — Lycos goes online at Carnegie Mellon with 54,000 documents; announced 12 August; the commercial lycos.com site is dated 13 April 1995. Three events, routinely collapsed into one.
1994 — Jerry Yang and David Filo start Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web, which becomes Yahoo. In late 1994 JumpStation stops, at 275,000 entries across 1,500 servers.
1995 — SavvySearch launches at Colorado State University; Search Engine Watch gives March in one article and May in another. AOL acquires WebCrawler on 1 June, MetaCrawler launches on 7 July, and Excite launches in October.
15 December 1995 — AltaVista launches from DEC's Palo Alto labs, using the multi-threaded Scooter crawler. ~300,000 hits on day one.

1996–1998 — the portal land grab

1996 is the year most people picture when they think of early search engines: almost every recognisable 1990s name launched, listed or was bought in this window.

January 1996 — Inktomi founded at UC Berkeley by Eric Brewer and Paul Gauthier. April: Lycos IPOs, closing day one at a 300 million dollar valuation — the fastest inception-to-IPO in NASDAQ history at the time.
May 1996 — HotBot launches, built by Wired's HotWired on Inktomi's engine. June: Infoseek IPOs under the ticker SEEK, and on 28 June Excite agrees to buy Magellan for about 18 million dollars in stock plus debt.
1996, also — Mamma launches in Montreal in July; Seznam is founded in Prague, Northern Light in the US and EuroSeek in Stockholm; Melbourne's Homebase is renamed LookSmart on 28 October; and in November Dogpile launches while Excite buys WebCrawler from AOL.
1 June 1997 — Ask Jeeves launches after an April beta, answering questions in natural language. 16 July: FAST founded in Norway. 15 September: google.com is registered. 23 September: Yandex launches. December: AltaVista launches Babel Fish.
21 February 1998 — GoTo.com demonstrates pay-for-placement search at TED8 and goes live that month. The idea is received badly and becomes the business model of the industry.
5 June 1998 — GnuHoo launches, is renamed NewHoo, and becomes the Open Directory Project when Netscape acquires it that October. MSN Search launches on third-party results.
4 September 1998 — Google Inc. is incorporated. Compaq completes its DEC acquisition in June, inheriting AltaVista; Lycos buys Wired Digital and HotBot in October; Disney takes 43% of Infoseek.

1999–2003 — the crash and the consolidation

January 1999 — Excite merges with @Home in a deal valued at 6.7 billion dollars in stock. 15 January: Disney launches GO.com around Infoseek.
1999 — AllTheWeb launches; Naver launches in Korea on 2 June; LookSmart and GoTo.com both IPO; AOL acquires Netscape and with it DMOZ; CMGI takes majority control of AltaVista in June.
18 January 2000 — Baidu founded in Beijing by Robin Li and Eric Xu. Google launches AdWords; Terra Networks buys Lycos for 12.5 billion dollars in October.
January 2001 — Infoseek's crawler runs for the last time. 29 January: Disney announces the closure of GO.com and its search engine, ~400 jobs and a ~790 million dollar write-off. Wikipedia gives February 2001; Disney's own SEC filing gives 29 January — prefer the filing.
2001 — Inference Find closes in March and Magellan in May. On 18 September Ask Jeeves buys Teoma for over 1.5 million dollars, gaining subject-specific popularity ranking. Excite@Home files for Chapter 11 on 1 October; GoTo.com renames itself Overture on 8 October. That autumn Lycos retires its own crawler, and InfoSpace acquires WebCrawler and switches it to Excite's database, ending its independence.
2002 — Northern Light withdraws its free public web search in January; Teoma leaves beta in April; LookSmart buys WiseNut; Gigablast enters public beta on 21 July; Yahoo switches its main results to crawler-based listings in October.
2003 — the year the non-Google web search industry was bought. Yahoo completes its acquisition of Inktomi on 19 March for 241 million dollars. Overture announces it will buy AltaVista on 18 February — the SEC-filed release gives about 140 million dollars, 80 million in stock and 60 million in cash, though one dated timeline puts completion at 28 April 2003 and the figure at 106 million. Overture announces the purchase of FAST's web division, including AllTheWeb, on 25 February for 70 million in cash plus up to 30 million in earn-outs. Yahoo then announces it is buying Overture on 14 July, reported at the time at about 1.6 billion dollars, completing on 7 October — one dated timeline gives 2.2 billion for the completed deal. On 6 October Microsoft tells LookSmart it will not renew.

2004–2012 — the duopoly forms

February 2004 — Yahoo drops Google and launches its own crawler, Yahoo Slurp — the only period it runs an independent web index. Google IPOs; Ask Jeeves buys Excite in March; Terra sells Lycos to Daum in August for 95.4 million dollars, a 99% loss on the 2000 price.
2005 — IAC acquires Ask Jeeves in July in a deal valuing it at 1.85 billion dollars.
February 2006 — Ask Jeeves drops the butler and becomes Ask.com, running its own crawler on Teoma technology; Teoma's brand is retired on 26 February. LookSmart closes Zeal on 28 March, and DMOZ's main server fails for nearly two months from October. Late September 2007: WiseNut is shut down.
2008 — Microsoft makes an unsolicited ~44.6 billion dollar bid for Yahoo in February, which Yahoo rejects. 28 July: Cuil launches to enormous publicity. DuckDuckGo launches this year — the year is documented, a precise day is not; 25 September is widely repeated and unverified.
3 June 2009 — Bing launches, announced 28 May by Steve Ballmer. Startpage is reconfigured to serve Google's results exclusively on 7 July, the Microsoft–Yahoo Search Alliance is announced on 29 July, and Ecosia launches in Berlin in December.
Late 2010 — Ask.com shuts down its in-house search engine, ends crawler development and cuts 130 engineering jobs. It never runs its own index again. 17 September: Cuil's servers go offline. Daum sells Lycos to Ybrant in August.
4 April 2011 — AllTheWeb is shut down by Yahoo. Its independent index had already ended around 2003. July 2011: Google shuts down Google Directory, removing DMOZ's largest distribution channel. DMOZ relicenses to Creative Commons Attribution.
2010–2012 — Yahoo's migration to Bing completes and Slurp is retired for yahoo.com; InfoSpace renames itself Blucora in June 2012.

2013–2020 — the shutdowns and the privacy wave

28 June 2013 — Yahoo announces AltaVista will close. 8 July 2013: AltaVista shuts down and altavista.com redirects to Yahoo Search — a redirect still in place, and still tracking its fr=altavista referral parameter, when checked on 19 August 2026.
4 July 2013 — Qwant officially launches in France after a February beta.
26 September 2014 — Yahoo announces the closure of the Yahoo Directory, which shuts on 31 December 2014. Yahoo becomes the default engine in Firefox in the US, a deal that runs to 2017.
2015–2016 — the Bing–Yahoo alliance is renegotiated to cover only the majority of desktop traffic; Verizon acquires AOL and inherits DMOZ; Lycos sells the hotbot.com domain for 155,000 dollars; and Yahoo begins disclosing the breaches that eventually cover all 3 billion of its accounts.
17 March 2017 — DMOZ closes. The public closure notice gave 14 March 2017; the site actually went to a single landing page on 17 March. Both dates circulate. September 2017: Curlie is announced as its successor. OpenMail renames itself System1. Verizon completes its acquisition of Yahoo in June.
2018–2020 — Kagi is founded in May 2018 and Neeva in 2019, both selling ad-free search by subscription. On 20 October 2020 the Department of Justice and eleven state attorneys-general file United States v. Google.

2021–2026 — AI search, and more shutdowns

2021 — first commit on Marginalia Search on 26 February; Brave Search enters public beta on 22 June, reaching general availability in May 2022; Neeva launches publicly in the US on 29 June at 4.95 dollars a month; Apollo acquires 90% of Yahoo on 1 September; You.com opens its public beta on 9 November.
2022 — Kagi opens a paid public beta; Neeva launches in Europe on 6 October reporting more than 600,000 monthly users; Perplexity launches its search product on 7 December.
January 2023 — NeevaAI ships generative answers with inline citations, ahead of both Microsoft and Google. It goes international on 13 February. Early April: Gigablast goes offline without warning or announcement.
20 May 2023 — Neeva announces it is shutting down consumer search, citing user acquisition above all. 2 June 2023: Neeva's search engine closes; Snowflake acquires the company that month for a reported 185.4 million dollars, refunding subscribers and deleting user data. May 2023: Google's Search Generative Experience enters Search Labs. Archie's last legacy server, at the University of Warsaw, ceases operation.
2024 — AI Overviews reach all US users in May and 100-plus countries on 28 October. The Serial Port relaunches Archie as a preservation exhibit on 11 May. 5 August: Judge Amit Mehta rules that Google is a monopolist. 31 October: ChatGPT search launches, after SearchGPT was announced in July.
2025 — Google's AI Mode arrives in March. 2 September: Mehta's remedies decision bans exclusive default deals and orders index and click data sharing, but rejects a Chrome divestiture. You.com's consumer search engine disappears as the company pivots to enterprise APIs.
27 January 2026 — Gemini 3 becomes the default model for AI Overviews globally. The same day Yahoo launches Scout, an AI answer engine built on Anthropic's Claude and grounded on Bing's API, not a Yahoo index. On 3 February the Google remedies take effect; appeals from both sides are before the D.C. Circuit and undecided. In April, Lycos shuts down Angelfire and Tripod.
1 May 2026 — Ask.com closes. IAC discontinues its search business entirely, ending a service that launched in June 1997 on the premise that you should be able to ask a question in plain English — twenty-five years before the industry agreed with it.
4 June 2026 — Qwant becomes the European Parliament's default search engine.

The shutdown dates, in one place

The most-searched dates on this page, separated from the narrative:

Infoseek — announced 29 January 2001 (Disney's SEC filing); crawler's last run January 2001. Wikipedia says February 2001.
Magellan — May 2001, by Excite.
WiseNut — late September 2007.
Cuil — 17 September 2010, servers offline, staff unpaid.
AllTheWeb — 4 April 2011, by Yahoo. Its own index had ended around 2003.
AltaVista — 8 July 2013, by Yahoo. Announced 28 June 2013.
Yahoo Directory — 31 December 2014. Announced 26 September 2014.
DMOZ — 17 March 2017. Announced date 14 March 2017.
Gigablast — early April 2023, with no announcement of any kind.
Neeva — 2 June 2023. Announced 20 May 2023.
Ask.com — 1 May 2026, closed by IAC.

Three names commonly listed as dead are not. Lycos and Excite both still resolve and both still have working search boxes — but neither has run a crawler for over two decades, and what they serve is somebody else's results. WebCrawler is the same story with a sharper irony: the site named after the first full-text web crawler has not crawled anything since 2001. Still online and still a search engine are different claims, and only the first is true of any of them.

Frequently asked questions

What was the first search engine, and when?

Archie, which went live on 10 September 1990, was the first internet search engine — though it indexed FTP filenames rather than web pages, because the web was not yet publicly available. McGill University and the Internet Hall of Fame both date its creation to 1989, so the year is contested. The first full-text web search engine was WebCrawler, on 21 April 1994.

What search engines existed in 1996?

1996 is the peak year of the land grab. Already running were Yahoo, WebCrawler, Lycos, Infoseek, Excite, MetaCrawler, SavvySearch and AltaVista. Launching or being founded that year: Inktomi in January, HotBot in May, Mamma in July, LookSmart in October, Dogpile in November, plus Seznam, Northern Light and EuroSeek. Excite bought Magellan in June and WebCrawler in November, making three famous brands one company.

When did AltaVista shut down?

8 July 2013, when Yahoo closed it and redirected altavista.com to Yahoo Search. The closure was announced on 28 June 2013 as part of a batch product sunset. By then AltaVista was already a shell serving Yahoo's results — its own index had been retired years earlier — so the 2013 event closed a front end rather than a working engine. The redirect is still live in 2026.

When did Ask.com shut down?

1 May 2026. IAC discontinued its search business entirely, and ask.com now serves a single sunset page with no search box. Ask.com had two deaths sixteen years apart: it shut down its own crawler and index in late 2010, cutting 130 engineering jobs, and spent its remaining years serving third-party results before the brand itself was closed in 2026.

Which search engines have shut down?

The major closures, dated: Infoseek in January 2001, Magellan in May 2001, WiseNut in September 2007, Cuil in September 2010, AllTheWeb in April 2011, AltaVista in July 2013, the Yahoo Directory in December 2014, DMOZ in March 2017, Gigablast in April 2023, Neeva in June 2023 and Ask.com in May 2026. Lycos, Excite and WebCrawler are often listed as dead but still operate as resellers.

When did Google launch?

The google.com domain was registered on 15 September 1997 and Google Inc. was incorporated on 4 September 1998, following the BackRub research project at Stanford. That makes Google seven years younger than Archie and four years younger than WebCrawler. Its contribution was not search itself but ranking by link analysis, which is why it displaced engines with comparable or larger indexes.

What happened to search in 2003?

Almost the entire non-Google Western search industry changed hands in about eight months. Yahoo completed its purchase of Inktomi in March; Overture bought AltaVista, announced 18 February, and FAST's web division including AllTheWeb, announced 25 February; and Yahoo then bought Overture, announced 14 July and completed 7 October, acquiring all of it. Reported prices vary between sources and are printed with their conflicts above.

When did AI search engines arrive?

Earlier than most accounts suggest. Neeva shipped citation-backed generative answers in January 2023, ahead of both Microsoft and Google, then shut down that June. Google's Search Generative Experience entered Search Labs in May 2023, AI Overviews reached all US users in May 2024 and 100-plus countries that October, and ChatGPT search launched on 31 October 2024. Gemini 3 became the default model for AI Overviews globally on 27 January 2026.

A timeline of search engines, 1990 to 2026