Search Engine

The New York Times first referenced the term "search engine" in 1992. An article points to when stock market traders used a computer system called the Market Information Machine. This system used a desktop computer to go through old and current banks of data to find patterns within the market. In a similar time period, the Chicago Tribune referred to it within the frame of using CD-ROM's for data retrieval. Here, the author highlights the competition that existed because the information on CD-ROM's could be replaced by publishers' personal search engines. In the Los Angeles Times there were no references to the search engine prior to the search settings of 1990. This shows that the emergence of this term was relatively new and only came into light with the rise of computers and the Internet. Using Proquest, I found an article that references the search engine in the 1989 Dartmouth Online Catalog. This search engine worked along a user-interface to search through databases as well as add databases. In Project Muse, an article from 1996 speaks about how the search engine was coupled with an early CD-ROM to look through a bank of 1,750 titles on the CD. Finally, in Jstor, a 1987 articles mentions the first usage of the term applying to higher speed search systems which could search through 250,000 characters of data per second.

All of these allusions to what a search engine is only give a small glimpse of how the term search engine is applied today. In today's world, the term search engine has practically become synonymous with Google. It is thought of a system that acts nearly instantaneously to go through seemingly infinite bases of information. However, the articles and journals of the past point out that it did not always work this way. It has taken a long time for the search engine to be able to search through masses of information quickly. Although since the late 1980's the term search engine has been around, it has transformed to an entirely different entity with the spread of the Internet.