There is a huge amount of rich history that can curated from the short live span of the internet and what we now call online search. The internet has become a huge part of our every day life. When most people run to a computer to "Google It" they don't even think twice about how the search results are being produced or question how this amazing technology came to be. The history of search is not a long one, but with many iterations throughout its time, there are some very interesting stories and transitions that took place.
When the internet first began there was no search engine. There really was no need for search engines during the inception of the internet. During this time there were only a few universities on internet and if you needed to connect to another node on the net, you would simply put in the web address shared with you (over the phone of course) and you would be taken to the shared portion of the specific machine you wanted to connect to.
The history of search really starts when the closed "internet" opened up and became public to everyone. This is when many people started calling the internet the world wide web and the birth of "www" to signify public areas specifically setup on a web server. The sub-domain www now has become synonymous with web addresses, but is not really required for any technical reasons.
Since the real world wide web launched there has been an amazing revolution in how people find what they are looking for on the internet. When the first search engines emerged online, they were clunky hard to use and of course only had limited resources to offer in their results pages. When the first wave of search engines died off, the next phase of search was more results oriented and less concerned about the ads and extra features on the search engine web site. This made searching online much more effective, but still almost every one of these early day search sites did not withstand the test of time. The history of search really started in the last ten years when entrepreneurs and big businesses both realized that the internet was here to stay.
Source: ezinearticles.com