Some things to know about a search engine and its complex algorithms. Even large companies faced many hurdles. There are many articles on the net, some highlights below : Yahoo! Search Yahoo! was founded in 1994 by David Filo and Jerry Yang as a directory of websites. For many years they outsourced their search service to other providers, but by the end of 2002 they realized the importance and value of search and started aggressively acquiring search companies. Overture purchased AllTheWeb and AltaVista. Yahoo! purchased Inktomi (in December 2002) and then consumed Overture (in July of 2003), and combined the technologies from the various search companies they bought to make a new search engine. Yahoo! dumped Google in favor of their own in house technology on February 17th, 2004. MSN Search MSN Search had many incarnations, being powered by the likes of Inktomi and Looksmart for a number of years. After Yahoo! bought Inktomi and Overture it was obvious to Microsoft that they needed to develop their own search product. They launched their technology preview of their search engine around July 1st of 2004. They formally switched from Yahoo! organic search results to their own in house technology on January 31st, 2005. MSN announced they dumped Yahoo!'s search ad program on May 4th, 2006. Google Google sprang out of a Stanford research project to find authoritative link sources on the web. In January of 1996 Larry Page and Sergey Brin began working on BackRub. After they tried shopping the Google search technology to no avail they decided to set up their own search company. Within a few years of forming the company they won distribution partnerships with AOL and Yahoo! that helped build their brand as the industry leader in search. Traditionally search was viewed as a loss leader. Despite the dotcom fever of the day, they had little interest in building a company of their own around the technology they had developed. Among those they called on was friend and Yahoo! founder David Filo. Filo agreed that their technology was solid, but encouraged Larry and Sergey to grow the service themselves by starting a search engine company. "When it's fully developed and scalable," he told them, "let's talk again." Others were less interested in Google, as it was now known. One portal CEO told them, "As long as we're 80 percent as good as our competitors, that's good enough. Our users don't really care about search." Google did not have a profitable business model until the third iteration of their popular AdWords advertising program in February of 2002, and was worth over 100 billion dollars by the end of 2005. Corrections Welcome. ;-)