Academic

Search Engines: Origins (Trivia)

By Jacqueline Lipton

Here's a trivia quiz about the history of Internet search engines.   Do you know how the following search engines got their names?

1. Archie
2. Lycos
3. Yahoo!
4. Overture
5. Google

Answers below the fold...

1. Name derived because the service scoured Internet-based ARCHIvEs.
2. Name derived from the Latin word for the wolf spider family whose members seek their prey actively rather than catching it in a web.  The service used a "spiderlike crawler" for search.
3. Yahoo!'s founders wanted an acronym that started with "YA" (for "yet another") so they looked under "ya" in the dictionary and found "yahoo".  They liked it because it was defined as a "rude, unsophisticated, uncouth person" which summed up their corporate ethos, and they could reverse engineer the word into:  "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle".
4. This was a name change from "GoTo".  The name was changed to reflect the company's core mission of making paid introductions (overtures) between users of its clients' websites and  advertisers.
5. A misspelling of Googol - the mathematical term for 10¹⁰⁰.

Source:  John Battelle, The Search:  How Google and its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed our Culture (2005)

Full post as published by The Faculty Lounge on August 12, 2009 (boomark / email).