WebCrawler
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WebCrawler is a search engine, and one of the oldest surviving search engines on the web today. For many years, it operated as a metasearch engine. WebCrawler was the first web search engine to provide full text search.<ref name=":0">Template:Cite web</ref>
History
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Brian Pinkerton first started working on WebCrawler, which was originally a desktop application, on January 27, 1994 at the University of Washington.<ref name=":1" /> On March 15, 1994, he generated a list of the top 25 websites.<ref name=":0" />
WebCrawler launched on April 21, 1994, with more than 4,000 different websites in its database<ref name=":1" /> and on November 14, 1994, WebCrawler served its 1 millionth search query<ref name=":1">Template:Cite web</ref> for "nuclear weapons design and research".<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
On December 1, 1994, WebCrawler acquired two sponsors, DealerNet and Starwave, which provided money to keep WebCrawler operating.<ref name=":1" /> Starting on October 3, 1995, WebCrawler was fully supported by advertising, but separated the adverts from search results.<ref name=":1" />
On June 1, 1995, America Online (AOL) acquired WebCrawler.<ref name=":1" /> After being acquired by AOL, the website introduced its mascot "Spidey" on September 1, 1995.<ref name=":1" />
Starting in April 1996,<ref name=":1" /> WebCrawler also included the human-edited internet guide GNN Select, which was also under AOL ownership.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
On April 1, 1997, Excite acquired WebCrawler from AOL for $12.3 million.<ref name=":1" /><ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
WebCrawler received a redesign on June 16, 1997, adding WebCrawler Shortcuts, which suggested alternative links to material related to a search topic.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
WebCrawler was maintained by Excite as a separate search engine with its own database until 2001, when it started using Excite's own database, effectively putting an end to WebCrawler as an independent search engine.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Later that year, Excite (then called Excite@Home) went bankrupt and WebCrawler was bought by InfoSpace in 2001.<ref name=":1" />
Pinkerton, WebCrawler's creator, led the Amazon A9.com search division as of 2012.<ref name="before">Template:Cite news</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
In July 2016, InfoSpace was sold by parent company Blucora to OpenMail for $45 million, putting WebCrawler under the ownership of OpenMail.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> OpenMail was later renamed System1.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
In 2018, WebCrawler was redesigned from scratch and its logo was changed.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
Traffic
[edit]WebCrawler was highly successful early on.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> At one point, it was unusable during peak times due to server overload.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> It was the second most visited website on the internet in February 1996, but it quickly dropped below rival search engines and directories such as Yahoo!, Infoseek, Lycos, and Excite in 1997.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
See also
[edit]- Aliweb
- InfoSpace
- Dogpile
- MetaCrawler
- List of search engines
- Search engine
- Comparison of search engines