❖ Search Engine: A software system designed to carry out web searches.
It searches
the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a text
web search query.
❖ Web Browser: Application software installed on a user's device used to access and
view websites on the World Wide Web (WWW).
Difference Between Search Engine and Web Browser
Feature Web Browser Search Engine
Software application used to access A website/tool used to search for
Definition
the internet. information on the internet.
Must be installed on your No installation required; accessed
Installation
computer/mobile (or built-in). through a web browser.
Stores browsing history, cookies, and Maintains a massive database/index
Storage
cache locally. of URLs globally.
Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Google Search, Bing, Yahoo!, Baidu,
Examples
Safari, Edge. DuckDuckGo.
Working of a Search Engine
1. Crawling: Uses automated bots (called Spiders or Web Crawlers) to scan websites
and collect data.
2. Indexing: Organizes and stores the collected data in a massive database for quick
retrieval.
3. Ranking: Uses algorithms (like Google's PageRank) to display the most relevant
results to the user's query
Important Facts
❖ World Wide Web (WWW): Invented by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 (while working at
CERN).
❖ First Web Browser: WorldWideWeb (Later renamed Nexus to avoid confusion with
the WWW). Developed by Tim Berners-Lee in 1990.
❖ First Popular Graphical Web Browser: Mosaic. Developed by Marc Andreessen and
Eric Bina in 1993 at NCSA.
❖ First Search Engine: Archie. Developed by Alan Emtage in 1990.
❖ First Full-Text Search Engine: WebCrawler (1994). It was the first to index entire
pages, not just titles/URLs.
❖ Indian Browser Developments: Epic Privacy Browser: Developed by Hidden Reflex
(an Indian software company founded by Alok Bhardwaj). It is the first privacy-centric
browser from India.
❖ JioPages: A fast, indigenous web browser launched by Reliance Jio.
❖ Edge's default search engine is Bing.
❖ Tor Browser: Stands for "The Onion Router." Used to browse the internet
anonymously and access the Dark Web.
List of Major Search Engines
Year Search Engine Founder / Company Country Key Feature
1990 Archie Alan Emtage Canada First ever search engine (FTP search).
Veronica / Univ. of Nevada /
1992 USA Search engines designed for the Gopher protocol.
Jughead Utah
1994 WebCrawler Brian Pinkerton USA First full-text web search engine.
Jerry Yang & David Started as a human-edited web directory, not a
1994 Yahoo! Search USA
Filo crawler.
Digital Equipment First to support natural language queries and
1995 AltaVista USA
Corp. multilingual search.
1997 Yandex Arkady Volozh Russia The dominant search engine in Russia.
Year Search Engine Founder / Company Country Key Feature
Larry Page & Sergey
1998 Google USA Revolutionized search with the PageRank algorithm.
Brin
The largest search engine in China (due to the Great
2000 Baidu Robin Li China
Firewall).
Strict privacy focus; does not track user searches or
2008 DuckDuckGo Gabriel Weinberg USA
IP addresses.
Replaced MSN/Live Search. Now heavily integrated
2009 Bing Microsoft USA
with AI (Copilot/ChatGPT).
Major Web Browsers
Year Browser Developer Key Feature
Nexus
1990 Tim Berners-Lee First ever web browser (text-based).
(WorldWideWeb)
A pure text-based browser (still used by visually
1992 Lynx Univ. of Kansas
impaired/Linux users).
Marc
1993 Mosaic Andreessen First widely used graphical browser.
(NCSA)
Year Browser Developer Key Feature
Dominant browser of the 1990s. Introduced Cookies and
1994 Netscape Navigator Netscape Comm.
JavaScript.
Bundled with Windows OS. Defeated Netscape in the "First
1995 Internet Explorer Microsoft
Browser War".
1995 Opera Opera Software Known for inventing tabbed browsing and built-in VPNs.
Default browser for macOS and iOS devices. Uses the
2003 Safari Apple Inc.
WebKit engine.
Mozilla Open-source browser. Built from the remnants of
2004 Mozilla Firefox
Foundation Netscape.
Most used browser globally today. Known for speed (V8
2008 Google Chrome Google
JavaScript engine).
Replaced Internet Explorer. Now rebuilt on the open-
2015 Microsoft Edge Microsoft
source Chromium project.