Editorial
My main aim about the #SearchwithPresearch writing competition on Publish0x was to write an article about the evolution of Web Search Engines over the past 30 years and include a significant chapter narrating my review about Presearch and its contribution in this evolution of web search engine technology. Unfortunately, this article was censored and banned from the writing competition and the platform and it was followed from my exit from Publish0x as an author. My second article about Presearch which also wasn't allowed to participate in the writing contest can be found here Presearch - The Decentralized Search Engine powered by the community. Therefore, all of my future articles will be published on this censorship free platform where freedom of speech is fundamental and undisputable.
Introduction
Since the invention of World Wide Web from Tim Burners-Lee in 1987, the need of a search mechanism that would allow the user to navigate through this vast concentration of information has become very essential. Over the past 30 years, search engines have passed various evolution stages. On this article, I would provide the most significant stages in which search engines have been evolved from the first search engines of 90s until today in the early '20s when they have managed to reach out the latest internet developments of decentralization and blockchain technology.
The early years of Indexing
Archie - The First "Search Engine" ?
According to pub and board games quizzes, the very first type of search engine can be considered to be Archie, a web tool built in 1990 by Alan Emtage, a student of the McGill University in Montreal Canada for indexing FTP archives, allowing users to easily identify specific files on a server. According to wikipedia a legacy Archie server is still maintained active for historic purposes in Poland at University of Warsaw's Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modelling.
Gopher
At the same period Emtage built Archie, another student named Mark McCahill from the University of Minnesota developed his innovative search engine was directly related to the internet and involved in the first coding for URLs which led to POP mail, which was one of the first types of email.
Aliweb - Archie Like Indexing for the Web
Inspired by Archie, Aliweb is widely considered to be indeed the first web search engine. It was launched in November 1993 and allowed webmasters to submit their web pages and enter the relevant keywords and descriptions for these pages. However, since the majority of the internet users of that period were preferring to navigate to websites using directories, lists and catalogues, Aliweb project was abandoned.
Show Me the Money & .com Search Engines of '90s
It wasn't long before during 1994 and the beginning of the technological boom of the internet that the new generation of students started slowly slowly to began using websites more than books and encyclopedia, and search engines more than web directories. Private investors saw the emerging value, wide use and the financial potential of search engines that were initially developed in an academical environment as University projects / spin-offs and started transforming them into profitable commercial ventures.
WebCrawler
WebCrawler was developed at the University of Washington and launched in 1994 as the first search engine that has been widely commercially supported by investors such as the Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. Although, as the name implies, it was just a metasearch engine that would take the results from other search engines of that period and blend those searches together, it was also the first search engine that could fully index the contents of an entire web pages, making every word and phrase searchable.
Lycos Web Portal
At the same year, Lycos translated as "Wolf" in Greek, was developed in the Carnegie Mellon University by a Ph.D. student, Michael Loren Mauldin. Although it began as a research project it resulted in what is known as an integrated services web portal including services such as social networking, email, and web hosting, among other features that are common in search engines platforms today.
Excite Commercial Web Portal
It was developed by a group of Stamford University graduates in 1995 and in can be considered as the first commercial search engine, providing apart from web search results, news, weather and stock market updates, Instant Messaging and a customizable homepage paving the way for other commercial search engine.
Altavista
It was the first search engine that has been developed by a private organisation and not as a University-bred project. It was launched in 1995 by the Digital Equipment Corporation and apart from producing results a little faster than its competitors, it developed various innovations such the use of Boolean operators in its search engine and a service called Babel Fish allowing users to translate phrases into other languages.
The Rise and Fall of Yahoo!
“Yahoo!” standing for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle" started as a traditional web directory in 1994 by two Stanford University graduates, Jerry Yang and David Filo. Then in 1995, Yahoo! launched a search engine that for the next 8 years was powered by other web search engines in order to produce its results. Yet, it created a huge strategical advantage by collecting and storing these results and their web locations into a huge database of information making them available later on the demand on its users on a faster rate. Although, Yahoo didn’t actually build any significant new web search technology and to the annoyance of its less known competitors, it became quickly very popular especially to the young generation who started using internet as a source of information. The success of Yahoo! was all about packaging of a fun brand name and a user-friendly interface, depending on other search engines. Through a series of acquisitions of other search engines such as Alltheweb, Overture, and Inktomi, borrowing their technology, Yahoo! managed not earlier than 2003 to develop its own self-crawling search engine in order to produce search results.
Still, Yahoo mainly due to its legacy as a web directory, it can be considered as one of the first search engines that were used for collecting popular sites and turning them into search results. Moreover, by allowing its users to search vertically for keywords within a specific category, for example, searching for just images, the news, or sports, Yahoo! users could narrow down their search, in order to find what they were looking for more easily.
On February 7th, 2000, Yahoo! (and other popular commercial websites) became the victim of an unprecedented Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack that was organised -as it was later proved, by a Canadian teenager with the nickname "Mafiaboy" who managed to cause a huge disturbance at Yahoo!'s web search engine service and a huge disappointment to its users who couldn't connect to Yahoo! servers in order to execute their web searches. Although, Mafiaboy was soon exposed by FBI due to a careless chatline boasting for his achievement, he managed to demonstrate how vulnerable commercial internet businesses could have been to even amateur DDoS attacks during the early 00s and his DDoS attack can be considered as the start of Yahoo!'s inevitable decline.
Over the following years, Yahoo! struggled to deliver strong financial results, making poor investments, acquisitions and business priorities. Blogging, Photo Sharing and Auction websites such as Tumblr, Overture Services, and Broadcast.com were acquired but then left without further development while competing services became billion-dollar success stories. Its web-crawling search technology has also been overtaken from new search engine innovations and its popularity among the new millennia generation started to fade out leading eventually to its acquisition from Verizon, an American telecommunication giant in 2017 for just $4.8 billion.
The emergence of Webpage Ranking Algorithms of the Modern Search Engines
Legacy web-crawling search engines of early 90s relied strongly on trusting the “keyword” meta tags found on a web page in order to define for which keyword searches to list the webpage for, requiring therefore a level of trust in webmasters who would only enter relevant keywords. Moreover, search engines often used the content of a web page in order to determine its importance, by counting the number of times a keyword appeared on the page. Yet, both of these search methodologies were exploited either for fun or profit as websites started listing every possible keyword in their meta tags and content, repeating the same keywords multiple times in order to appear higher in the web results of a web query. These ugly lists would often be hidden at the bottom of the page or in the same colour font as the background, rendering them invisible. For example in order to promote a webpage "A" by outranking another webpage "B" on the search results, that it was using a specific keyword 50 times, all that the webmaster had to do, it was to use that keyword 150 times! Today, similar practices can be considered as spamming.
As a result, a new generation of web search engines emerged during the late 90s, that were based on specialised web search optimization algorithms and technologies that were developed to successfully overcome these kind of "spamming" practises in the ranking of the web results.
AskJeeves
In 1996, two students from Berkeley, California Garrett Gruener and David Warthen developed AskJeeves where users were able to ask a question to the search engine, to which the search engine would list web page results. The purpose of the search results was to answer the question that was asked by the user at the same way a butler called "Jeeves" provides his services to his master.
The main innovation of AskJeeves was its own Search Engine Optimization (SEO) algorithm called ExpertRank which it can be considered as one of the first attempts to pass the level of metasearch web-crawling by creating a web ranking system working with a subject-oriented popularity system. It was based on the idea that if a website on a specific subject has backlinks from other sites on the same subject, then it could be considered as more relevant.
Facing heavy competition from other dominating search engines during 2010 and due to the threat of copyright infringement as butler's name "Jeeves" was taken from P.G. Wodehouse's fictional works, the company outsourced its web search department and it was rebranded to Ask.com returning to its roots as a Q&A community website.
Baidu - The Chinese Google
At the same year with the launch of AskJeeves, a Chinese computer scientist with a PhD from the University of Buffalo in New York, called “Robin” Li Yanhong patented a system called RankDex, used for ranking the importance of web pages in a search result using “link analysis” in order to determine the importance of web pages by the number of other pages linking to them. In fact RankDex is today the basis of every major search engine’s ranking algorithm, predating Google’s “PageRank” by two years and being referenced in Larry Page’s first patent document. Without RankDex, search engines today may still would be using keywords, not links, as their primary ranking factor dominated by meta tags and keyword spamming.
Shortly after 2000, Robin Li and Eric Xu co-founded and incorporated Baidu which became China’s largest search engine mainly due to its willingness to comply with Chinese Goverment's censorship policy for specific keywords and news sources.
The Google Empire
Originally named as “Backrub” after its link-based ranking algorithm, Google, a play on the term “googol” (10 to the power of 100) was founded by two PhD students of Stanford University, CA, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Although its delayed launch on the stage of internet search engines on September 1998, the company had big ambitions since its seeding investing period as it managed to raise the astonishing amount of $1 million with investments from key investors such as the Sun Microsystems co-founder, Andy Bechtolsheim and Jeff Bezos, the ambitious founder of an online bookstore called Amazon.
As the pre-existing web search of mid 90s started to suffer from intense metadata spamming and relevancy issues, Larry Page, inspired by Li's RankDex algorithm, suggested his own search engine optimization solution by patenting his own webpage ranking system based on his PageRank algorithm. The advantage of PageRank Algorithm through its various updates that were developed over the years, is the fact that it is capable to examine not only how many backlinks a page has, but also how important those linking pages are. For example, a link from the Guardian webpage is more important than a link from a spammy hub page, as thousands of other sites would be linking to that Guardian webpage and many of those sites would themselves have thousands of relevant links. This ripple effect is still difficult to be manipulated by webmasters, as every link requires many levels of other links pointing at them, in order to provide enough "weight" in order to push a web page on the top of the web search results rankings.
As the internet during the new millennium started being used for more commercial purposes rather than just a source of academic information of the new millennia students, spam-free web results became increasingly significant for the online e-commerce businesses. Interestingly, web searches for academic papers with a couple of results a month were replaced by hundreds of searches for [car insurance], [designer clothing] and [credit cards], each with hundreds of thousands of competing pages. Google finally had the magic formula for sweeping out the spammy SEO keyword pages from its web search results and ranking more trustworthy commercially-oriented websites first.
Google's innovative PageRank Search Engine Optimization algorithm combined with the minimalist still funky design of its homepage that stood stronger in contrast with the advertising and content-heavy web portals implemented by virtually every other search engine, helped Google to establish by 2002 its dominance and popularity on the search engine market. As a result, Its dominance on the search engine market provided tremendous financial growth to Google and its parent company Alphabet, enabling to expand its internet-based empire beyond of just a sophisticated search engine, and either through acquisitions or in-house developments it owns today an entire suite of internet-based technologies that that has become a commodity in the entire world. However, the greatest achievement of Google is the fact that the term, “Google it” has been defined today as the mainstream way of communication when someone s looking for information on the web.
Inktomi - A B2B Web Search Engine that experienced Google's dominance
Inktomi Corporation was founded in January 1996 by University of California, Berkeley professor Eric Brewer and his graduate student Paul Gauthier based on a University web search engine project and its name pronounced "INK-tuh-me", was derived from a legend of the Lakota people about a trickster spider character, Iktomi, which was known for his ability to defeat larger adversaries through wit and cunning.
Unlike the majority of web search engines that emerged during mid 90s, Inktomi wasn't a direct provider of web search results to internet users. Instead, it chose a different B2B business model as a provider of its web-crawling technology to other web portals that couldn't support the development of their own web search engine, however due to the big web search engine hype, they really wanted and needed to have one embedded on their website. Inktomi's customers included Yahoo! Amazon.com, Ebay Corp, Computerworld.com and even Microsoft for its MSN.com portal and in March 2000 Inktomi had a market cap of $25 billion. .However just one year after, its stock price dropped 99.9% due to the dominance of Google's Web Search Engine among the Internet users signalling the end of web-crawling search engine technology.
In fact the problem rose as back as 1999 when Inktomi's biggest customers and many other web businesses started complaining because when a user was typing the name of their business, their website wasn't on the top of the search results. For example Yahoo wouldn't have brought www.yahoo.com as No1 web search result! Inktomi tried to fix the "bug" by developing a tool to “measure the relevance effect of algorithmic changes based on precomputed human judgements.” Yet, internet users still continued to use Google's Web Search Engine and the reason was the user experience that Google offered to its users.
An Inktomi's former employee, Diego Basch narrates:
“Despite our relevance being so great, there was one huge red flag: engineers at Inktomi were starting to use Google as our search engine."
Basch also explains:
"The Google Experience was far superior to Inktomi’s. Here are the two reasons:
Inktomi didn’t control the front-end. We provided results via our API to our customers. This caused latency. In contrast, Google controlled the rendering speed of their results.
Inktomi didn’t have snippets or caching. Our execs claimed that we didn’t need caching because our crawling cycle was much shorter than Google’s. Instead of snippets, we had algorithmically-generated abstracts. Those abstracts were useless when you were looking for something like new ipad screen resolution. An abstract wouldn’t let you see that it’s 2048×1536, you’d have to click a result."
Engineers even went so far as to build a slick looking UI for their internal search but the executive management of Inktomi determined that they didn’t want to move forward with improving the user experience of Inktomi in this way and eventually, on December 2002, Yahoo! purchased Inktomi Corp and its web search engine technology for about $235 million in its attempt to develop its own web search engine in order to unsuccesfully compete with Google.
Challenging Google's Dominance
According to Oberlo.com, Google has managed to hold by 2021, an astonishing 91.45% share of the search engine market! However, over the years, it is exactly that undisputed domination that has actually lured several contenders that keep trying to find a strategic advantage, an innovation over Google's weak points such as its privacy-oriented issues in order to raise their own share on the market. Nevertheless, the antitrust argument says that big tech needs to break up in multiple sub companies in order to stop abusing competition and consumers in a two-faced role and independent startup search engine companies can now hold enough funding and technology in order to provide to the internet users alternative "antitrust" search engines.
Microsoft and its multiple attempts to compete Google
Dominating already the Operating System (OS) market of personal computers market with the launch of Windows 95, Microsoft decided to land into the web services world just in 1998 by launching MSN Search when Microsoft’s Windows 98 was used by over the 90% of the Internet users. Unfortunately, Microsoft failed to foresee the dominance of the emerging search engine optimization technologies, and instead of taking advantage of the hordes of programmers residing on Microsoft's headquarter in Seattle in order to develop its own webpage ranking system, Microsoft opted the conventional and "safe" solution of powering MSN Search with third-party search engines which proved to be the fading mainstream of that period.
In wasn't until 2004, that Microsoft decided to provide enough financial support to its search engine department in order to build its own in-house search engine technology that was launched the next year. However, because of the success of its portal in the B2B world as a business directory, Microsoft chose to provide its MSN Search technology to other search engines, internet providers and portals, gaining though a respectful market share and a cut of advertising revenues instead of making it attractive enough directly to the internet users. Even worse, when MSN Search started to raise popularity as the default search engine of millions of Internet Explorer browsers, Microsoft kept rebranding its service to “Microsoft Live” in 2006 and again in “Live Search” in 2007.
Eventually, In 2009, Microsoft decided to rebrand its search engine for one last time, to Bing, becoming a point of ridicule in the internet forums due to the continuous brand name changes and the initial poor search result quality. However, over the following years, Bing managed to become a serious best of the rest search engine behind Google holding in 2021 an organic 2.69% share of the web search engine market. Bing also continued to support other 3rd party search engines such as Yahoo! (1.47% share) that decided to continue being powered by other search engines and Ecosia, an ecological web search engine that commits 80% of its revenue in planting trees helping in the restoration of the climate change.
DuckduckGo - A Privacy-oriented Search Engine
In 2006, AOL shared publicly for research purposes a data file with three months worth of search history, including 20 million search queries from 650,000 users. Although, the searcher’s account details weren’t visible, they were given a random ID that allowed researchers to group searches by individual users. Still, some searches contained Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and the identity of some users was eventually also revealed. As a result, the concerns that have been arisen the previous years over web search privacy has stopped being a matter of just paranoid conspiracy theories and became a reality that couldn't be hidden anymore.
DuckDuckGo was founded by Gabriel Weinberg and when it was launched at the beginning of 2008, when many legacy search engines were either forced to close or shift their operations as they couldn't compete with Google's dominance and search results accuracy, nobody took him seriously. Especially since it started operating as another web crawler of the 90s combining results from over 400 other search engines including Wikipedia, Bing, Yandex, and Yahoo.
So, why would people use it? According to it's founder, the strategic advantage of DDG is that it respects the privacy of its users' as web searches are meant not to be tracked or recorded like it happens on most search engines such as Google. Over the '10s, when NSA's Prism project slides leaked by Edward Snowden were published on Guardian showed how big tech companies were providing users' data and search history to US Intelligence and exploiting people's behavior on the web as collectors and sellers of personal data, DuckDuckGo started to attract a cult of privacy-concerned web users who might also have preferred to use privacy-protected Tor web browser and other alternative web services that weren't controlled by the big internet companies.
In 2011, Union Square Ventures made an angel investment in DDG in its efforts to exploit financially that "alternative" part of the search engine market. Characteristically, they justify their investment as follows:
Not because we thought it would beat Google. We invested in it because there is a need for a private search engine. We did it for the Internet anarchists, people that hang out on Reddit and Hacker News.
Nonetheless, DuckDuckGo does have ways to make money, and it is profitable without exploiting its users data and by 2012, it announced that it was serving 1.5 million searches a day and making $115,000 from privacy-friendly advertising. In comparison with Google Search business model where the use of the search engine is free, the company is estimated that makes more than $100bn a year from advertising based on tracking and targeting users. DuckDuckGo's strategic advantage over Google is the fact of NOT collecting any information, NOT storing users searches, and NOT tracking them across the web. This means it can’t sell personalised advertising, and it can’t deliver personalised search results. Also, governments can’t get users data, because there isn’t any. According to its Blog, DDG finance its operations by generating money through traditional internet advertising and affiliate channels and displaying paid ads at the top of user's searches. DuckDuckGo is also part of the affiliate programs of the eCommerce websites Amazon and eBay. When the user visit those sites through DuckDuckGo, and subsequently make a purchase, it receives a small commission:
This mechanism operates anonymously and there is no personally identifiable information exchanged between us and Amazon or eBay. These links are regular organic links (like any other link in our results) and these programs do not influence our ranking or relevancy functions in any way. That is, they are not advertising like paid placements or paid inclusions, and we only generate revenue from them if you ultimately find them relevant enough to end up purchasing an item.
Interestingly, DuckDuckGo has a talkative privacy policy and towards the bottom of the webpage it declares that DDG is indeed saving all user search queries:
We also save searches, but again, not in a personally identifiable way, as we do not store IP addresses or unique User agent strings. We use aggregate, non-personal search data to improve things like misspellings
Currently DuckDuckGo provides 1.8 billion searches a month and has a USA search engine market share of 1.24%.
Amazon's Alexa Voice-based Search Engine
Voice-based Search can be considered as the next generation of web search allowing users to ask their questions to a “Smart Device”, instead of typing the keywords into a web browser. Today, all major tech companies have developed their own voice-based personal assistant. Naming Microsoft's Cortana, Apple's Siri, Google's Google Assistant, the most ambitious and successful project from all is Amazon's Alexa owning in 2019/2020 period a 28% global market share and 53% in the USA.
Being heavily influenced by by the computer-based conversational system of "Star Trek" science fiction TV Series and movies franchise and respecting Amazon's philosophy for innovation and not replication, Jeff Bezos of Amazon decided not to mimic Microsoft's failed attempts to compete Google by creating just another browser-based search engine. Thinking out of the box, he decided to find a way to transfer the search engine out of internet user's office an eventually web browser and move it to the centre of every family's sitting room by launching in 2014 a series of speaker devices equipped with a voice-based assistant called Alexa.
Possibly voice-based search engines suits searches that only require one answer, such as “What is the capital of Greece?”, but they can hardly compete with a web browser when the user expects many results or detailed information. In fact, the main problem with voice search is that no matter how realistic the synthetic voices sound, nobody wants to hear a speaker reading the web pages of the top ten search results to them or a menu of a web online booking service at the same way that people are tired to listen all available options of an automated telephone system.
Presearch - The Decentralized Search Engine powered by the community
Presearch, founded on 2017 by Colin Pape and Thomas Leclair, is a pro-privacy blockchain-based search engine that is using cryptocurrency tokens as an incentive to decentralize web search, hoping to loose Google's abuse over internet users search data. It is estimated that currently counts 2 million total registered users, and about 900,000 search queries a day.
Genesis
In fact, the idea about Presearch was born over a decade ago out of the frustration of Colin Pape who was struggling to build and maintain a local listing online business named ShopCity.com only to have its efforts downranked by Google in its web search results. According to Colin Pape's interview to TechCrunch:
“That was actually the real genesis moment behind [Presearch] — the realization of just
how big Google is. In 2011 we woke up one day and found out that 80-90% of our Google traffic had disappeared and all of these sites, some of which had been online for more than a
decade and were being run in partnership with city governments and chambers of commerce, they were all basically demoted onto page eight of Google. Even if you typed them by name… Google had effectively, in their own backyard, shut down this local initiative. We ended up participating in this [FTC] investigation and ultimately it cleared Google
but we’ve been really aware of the market power that they have — and certainly what
could be perceived as monopolistic practices. It’s a huge challenge. Anybody trying to do any sort of publishing or anything really on the web, Google is the
gatekeeper.”
Presearch Key Differentiation Framework
As it is defined in Presearch Vision White Paper, Presearch Team believes that the best way to compete with this massive, centralized and monopolistic corporation as Google that currently dominates the global search engine market but also is to build a framework of a community-powered, decentralized search engine that provides better results while protecting users privacy and rewarding them for their web searches. And based on this framework, the Presearch platform currently consists of the following components and experiences:
Providing Better Results with Presearch Web Search Engine
Operating as a conventional web-crawler, the Presearch Engine actually utilizes the power of world’s top search engines and websites in order to provide to internet users a compelling web search experience, by offering quality censorship-resistant results, protecting users privacy and providing them with more choices and control. For example, it provides to the users the choice to select the source of their results over a list of 100 search engines and websites. The full list of these search providers can be found on https://presearch.org/account/search-providers.
Presearch also provides an additional layer of data through community packages which makes those results even better. One such package, inspired by Pape's initial online business, is the capability of search results localisation available on https://engine.presearch.org/.
Furthermore, by being a blockchain-oriented search engine, Presearch has embedded since June 2020 an extra crypto package powered by CoinGecko.com in order to improve its cryptocurrency search results.
Privacy-oriented & Decentralised Platform
Apart from providing better quality results to its users, Presearch claims that it protects internet users privacy because it does NOT track internet users browsing habits or storing their your searches, and web search queries are handled by a decentralized network of node servers processed as anonymized queries. An interesting technical analysis about Presearch's privacy orientation can be found by [PierreL] in his article Is Presearch respectful of your privacy?
The Presearch Rewarding System and the Presearch Token ($PRE)
During the development of the platform, the Presearch Team realised that providing just a robust privacy-oriented decentralised web search engine isn't enough in order to establish Presearch in that highly competitive search engine market not only against Google but also against the already establish Microsoft's Bing, Yahoo! and even DuckDuckGo. Therefore, in order to become widely attractive to internet users and not just to that market-limited privacy-concerned and alternative internet users, Presearch developed a sophisticated blockchain rewarding system and its own native token the Presearch Token ($PRE) which is is an ERC20 Token built on the Ethereum blockchain with a current circulation supply of 396,578,435 out of 500,000,000 tokens.
The PRE token actually operates as an incentive to Presearch community members through four rewarding channels such as the Use of Presearch as the designated Search Engine for obtaining authentic web results, an Affiliate Program, the Presearch Staking Program and the Decentralised Node Operations Program.
In summary, Presearch provides a well organised robust, modern and independent privacy-oriented search engine and can be considered as a strong alternative to Google web search dominance.
Sign-up with my referral link and get 25 PRE tokens as a bonus.
The Incoming Brave Blockchain Contender
Competition over Presearch, doesn't exist only from Google or Bing, the traditional web-crawlers and privacy-oriented search engines such as DuckDuckGo but also from similar independent blokchain-based privacy-oriented ventures such as Brave, a well known and established among the blockchain enthusiasts web browser whose ambition is to build its own user-first, user friendly and privacy-oriented internet blockchain-based ecosystem.
And towards this path, just like Microsoft incorporated MSN Search into Internet Explorer in the late 90s, and Google Search Engine is being bundled with Google Chrome, Brave Browser has announced on 3rd March 2021 that it is planning to develop its own web search engine after acquiring Tailcat, an open search engine developed by the team formerly responsible for the privacy search and browser products at Cliqz, a holding of Hubert Burda Media, making it the foundation of Brave Search.
According to Brave's announcement:
Under the hood, nearly all of today’s search engines are either built by, or rely on, results from Big Tech companies. In contrast, the Tailcat search engine is built on top of a completely independent index, capable of delivering the quality people expect, but without compromising their privacy. Tailcat does not collect IP addresses or use personally identifiable information to improve search results.
Brendan Eich, CEO and co-founder of Brave Software commended:.
"Brave has grown significantly over the past year, from 11 million monthly active users to over 25 million. We expect to see even greater demand for Brave in 2021 as more and more users demand real privacy solutions to escape Big Tech’s invasive practices. Brave’s mission is to put the user first, and integrating privacy-preserving search into our platform is a necessary step to ensure that user privacy is not plundered to fuel the surveillance economy."
Dr. Josep M. Pujol, head of the Tailcat project also commended:
"The only way to counter Big Tech with its bad habit of collecting personal data is to develop a robust, independent, and privacy-preserving search engine that delivers the quality users have come to expect. People should not be forced to choose between privacy and quality. The team is excited to be working on the only real private search/browser alternative to Big Tech available on the market."
Disclaimer: All information found on this article is for informational purposes only. I do not provide any personal investment advice so please make your own research before proceeding to any investment/trading actions
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Resources
https://cognitiveseo.com/blog/4987/the-history-of-search-engines-infographic/
https://dynomapper.com/blog/21-sitemaps-and-seo/493-the-history-of-search
https://www.whoishostingthis.com/resources/history-search-engines/
https://www.oberlo.com/statistics/search-engine-market-share
https://help.duckduckgo.com/company/advertising-and-affiliates
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/askjack/2019/dec/12/duckduckgo-google-search-engine-privacy
https://www.computerworld.com/article/2579668/yahoo-buys-search-firm-inktomi-for--235m.html