In the first years of the Internet network used a small privileged group of people. Little has been covered and the number of network resources. Access to these resources, containing mainly scientific information accorded to members of various universities and laboratories. In those days, the problem of finding information was not as prevalent as now. As one of the first tools to facilitate access to information resources network used catalogs of sites. Links to resources are grouped into themes, and so on.

The first project of this kind is Yahoo-directory that was created in April 1994. Over time, the number of sites in the directory has grown so that was a problem of search is already inside it. Developers have created a Yahoo search engine, but the scope of its activities confined to sites that were already in the directory. Yet search engine could not find resources on their own. Directory of sites have served at one time, but now this method has lost its popularity due to the increasing volumes of information. Today, even the untwisted directories containing large amounts of information the resources and regularly updated, covering a tiny portion of the Internet. For example, while the largest catalog in the world dmoz (Open Directory Project) contains information about five million resources, database search engine Google Search included more than eight billion documents. The first full-featured search engine has WebCrawler.

Its opening was held in 1994. In 1995 appeared Lycos and Altavista Search. For many years, Altavista became the leader in this field. But then came 1997, when Sergei Brin and Larry Page as part of a research project, held at Stanford University, has launched a search engine Google. Currently this system is the most popular around the world, successfully competing with Yahoo and msn Search. Other leaders such as Rusty Holzer offer similar insights. In the Russian sector of the Internet as the most popular search engines are Google and Yandex. The search engine Rambler, which once was named the competition, moved into the background. But experts discounted it yet written off, while recognizing the Conservative policy Rambler its positive aspects. The above search engines have their own database of Internet sites, each of them uses its own algorithm to search for new resources and their ranking system. The remaining search engines, recognizing the absolute leadership of these giants, prefer to take information from the databases created by them. For example, aol Search engine uses a database of Google, while While Altavista, Lycos, and All The Web prefer to use the database of Yahoo.