Search engines at a glance

SISTRIX expert author headshot
From:
SISTRIX Content Team
Steve Paine
10.11.2025
SEO Basics

Without search engines, the internet would be a confusing mess. But how did they develop? From the first directories to Google’s dominance today – a look at the history and technologies behind web search.

Discover how SISTRIX can be used to improve your search marketing. Use a no-commitment trial with all data and tools: Test SISTRIX for free

What is a search engine?

A search engine is a software system that collects and analyses content on the internet and makes it accessible to users via search queries. Technically, search engines consist of a crawler (for collecting web pages), an index (for structured storage) and a ranking algorithm (for evaluating relevance).

Search engines are the central tool for navigating the internet. Without them, the World Wide Web would be a confusing web of unconnected pages. The development of these systems went hand in hand with the growth of the internet: the first search services made it easier to access information as early as the 1990s, before Google conquered the market with its revolutionary algorithm in 1998. But it was a long road to get there – marked by innovation, competition and technological progress.

In the following, we take a closer look at the development of search engines – from the first simple directories to Google’s rise.

The emergence of the World Wide Web – The basis for search engines

Today’s internet is based on a technology developed by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in the late 1980s: the World Wide Web (WWW).

Before the web was created, the internet was a loose collection of networked computers that communicated via ARPANET (a precursor to the internet). Information was provided via simple file servers or protocols such as Gopher. There was no universal way to link or search content.

In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee proposed the concept of a hypertext-based internet. This developed into the World Wide Web as we know it today, which basically consists of linked documents.

With the opening of the Internet to the general public in the mid-1990s, the number of websites exploded. Without a central structure or directories, it was difficult to find relevant content. The first search engines emerged to make the exponentially growing web searchable.

The 1990s: Search engines as pioneers of the World Wide Web

In the early 1990s, the internet was still an academic network that was mainly accessible via directories and links. There were no search engines in the modern sense, just static lists of websites. It was only with the exponential growth of the web that the need arose to automatically index information and make it searchable.

The first search engines (1990–1994)

  • Archie (1990): The first ‘search engine’, but only for FTP servers. It allowed users to search for file names, but not for web pages.
  • Veronica & Jughead (1992–1993): Search services for the Gopher protocol, an early alternative to today’s WWW.
  • ALIWEB (1993): One of the first web search engines, but without automated indexing – web pages had to be entered manually.

With the increasing number of websites, these approaches soon became insufficient. The first search engines with automatic indexing were developed.

The breakthrough: web crawlers and index search engines (1994–1998)

  • WebCrawler (1994): The first search engine to index entire web pages and make them searchable. A milestone in the development of search technologies.
  • Lycos (1994): One of the first commercial search engines with a large index, which quickly became popular.
  • AltaVista (1995): A pioneer of modern search engines. With powerful indexing technology, AltaVista set new standards in speed and scope.
  • Excite (1995): Used early approaches to semantic search to cluster results by topic.
  • Yahoo! Directory (1994): Not a classic search index, but a human-maintained directory that remained popular for a long time.
  • Fireball (1996): In Germany, Fireball was an independent search engine developed by the Technical University of Berlin in 1996. Fireball was one of the first powerful German-language search engines and was able to assert itself as the market leader in Germany in the late 1990s before being taken over by T-Online.

  • Ask Jeeves (1997): Utilised an early form of natural language search (question-answer model).
  • HotBot (1996): One of the first search engines with powerful personalisation and filtering capabilities.
  • Infoseek (1995–1999): Had an aggressive indexing strategy and offered early forms of sponsored results.

The dnde the early search engines 

Although these well-known search engines made the web searchable, they soon encountered significant problems:

  • Spam and manipulation: Website operators were able to manipulate rankings through keyword stuffing.
  • Relevance problems: The algorithms usually only evaluated pages based on keyword frequency, which often led to irrelevant results.
  • Scaling problems: The rapidly growing web placed ever-increasing demands on indexing and ranking methods.
  • Advertising search results: Many search engines relied on advertising for revenue and did not offer their users the best search results, but primarily advertising.

Two students at Stanford University recognised these problems and developed a new search engine for their doctoral thesis that would revolutionise the World Wide Web: Google.

The dominance of Google (from 1998 onwards)

Google itself was founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin and revolutionised search technology with a new algorithm: the PageRank method. This evaluated pages based on incoming links, which led to significantly more relevant search results. Similar to scientific papers, the number of citations was intended to provide information about the quality of the source.

In addition to PageRank, Google introduced further innovations:

  • Faster indexing: Google crawled the web more efficiently than other search engines.
  • Minimalist user interface: While other search engines such as Yahoo! were overloaded with advertising, Google opted for a simple home page consisting only of a search field, which set it apart from the advertising-laden search engines.
  • Better scalability: Google developed a powerful infrastructure to index the web faster and more comprehensively.

This combination of better algorithms, technical superiority and user-friendliness, and the initial complete absence of advertising or paid search results ensured that Google quickly pushed out the competition and became the dominant search engine.

With AdWords, Google also developed a lucrative model that made it very easy to place relevant ads for specific search queries in the search engine, even with smaller budgets. Today, advertising from Google Search accounts for almost 80% of Google’s revenue.

Modern search technologies: semantics, AI and mobile search

Since the mid-2010s, Google has fundamentally advanced its search technology. With systems such as RankBrain (2015), BERT (2019) and MUM (2021), Google uses artificial intelligence and natural language processing (NLP) to better understand the meaning of search queries. Instead of just comparing individual keywords, Google analyses the semantic context of entire sentences. This significantly improves the quality of results, especially for complex or ambiguous search queries.

In March 2025, Google introduced its AI Overviews worldwide. These new search features summarise the most important information for certain queries directly above the classic search results – created by Google’s own AI system Gemini. This gives users a direct, summarised answer without having to click on external websites. For website operators, this means that the click-through rate from organic searches can drop significantly, even if their content is used as a source.

At the same time, search behaviour has changed significantly due to mobile devices: over 60% of all search queries now come from smartphones. Google has responded to this with its ‘mobile-first index’ – the mobile version of a website is now decisive for its ranking. Voice search is also gaining in importance: users are increasingly formulating queries as spoken questions rather than individual terms. This places new demands on the structure and language of content – especially for local or dialogue-oriented searches.

Search engines worldwide

Despite Google’s dominance, there are significant alternatives in some countries:

  • China – Baidu: Market leader in China, as Google is blocked by the Great Firewall.
  • Russia – Yandex: Strong market position thanks to better processing of the Russian language.
  • South Korea – Naver: Offers search results combined with curated content.
  • SearchGPT, Perplexity and Co.: Since 2024, AI chatbots have also been entering the market as search engines, providing answers directly without having to click on search results. However, the quality of AI responses often leaves much to be desired and is legally controversial, as content is used without the consent of the authors.

The role of Google in Germany

In Germany, Google has dominated the mobile search engine market for years with a market share of over 90%. Reasons for this dominance:

  • Technological superiority: Google’s algorithms usually deliver the best results.
  • Localisation: Google Maps, Google My Business and integration with Android and Chrome strengthen usage.
  • Lack of alternatives: Bing has only a small market share, and privacy-oriented search engines such as Startpage and DuckDuckGo are niche products.
  • Own operating system Android: Google’s Chrome browser and search engine are pre-installed on most smartphones. For this reason, there have been efforts to break up Google in recent years in order to end its de facto monopoly as a search engine.

Google’s strong position means that German companies must focus their SEO strategies almost exclusively on Google. Algorithm updates such as core updates or helpful content updates have a direct impact on visibility and traffic.

How SISTRIX helps

Search engines are constantly changing – new algorithms, Google updates and changes in user behaviour have a direct impact on website visibility. SISTRIX provides comprehensive data on visibility in Google, helping companies and SEO experts to identify changes at an early stage. Features such as the visibility index allow the impact of Google updates to be analysed and optimisation strategies to be adjusted.

Line graph of the visibility index of coffeecircle.com.

In addition to general visibility, SISTRIX enables detailed analyses of individual keywords and competitors. Companies can see which terms they rank for, how their rankings are developing, and which domains are particularly strongly represented in the SERPs.

Other key features:

  • Update Radar: Measures SERP fluctuations to determine whether a Google update is currently being rolled out.
  • Keyword Tracking: Identifies opportunities and weaknesses in rankings.
  • Competitor Comparisons: Provides data on which strategies are making other market participants successful.
  • SERP Histories: Shows how search results for specific terms change over time.

With these tools, SISTRIX provides a foundation for data-driven SEO – regardless of how search engines evolve.

SISTRIX expert author headshot
From:
SISTRIX Content Team
Steve Paine
10.11.2025
SEO Basics