The list of Yahoo's Top 10 all-time searches
March 8th 2010 05:32
The history of accessible online search engines, boys and girls, goes way back to the pre-Gen Y days of 1995.
Oh, yes, you can argue, as they do here, that the concept of hypertext and memory extension can be traced to Vannevar Bush's wonderfully crazy data storage ideas in 1945 ...
And you can argue that the first online search engine was Archie (archives get it?), created in 1990 by a Montreal university student named Alan Emtage ...
And you can argue that Excite, introduced in 1993, and Lycos, Webcrawler, Galaxy and Altavista, all introduced in 1994, are worthy of mention ...
But the truth is that the only really important moment in search engine history that does not feature the word Google came in April 1994 when David Filo and Jerry Yang the Yahoo! Directory.
And now Yahoo!, the company with the exclamation mark in its name which has generated much debate about whether or not it is grammatically correct to use a comma after it to denote a pause, is celebrating its 15th birthday.
As part of its birthday celebrations, Yahoo! has produced a list of the 10 most popular searches in its 15-year history. The list is a fascinating insight into the things we think about. Take out the predictable disasters, and we are a banal lot.
The Yahoo! 15-year Top 10
1. September 11
2. Cloning
3. Iraq war
4. Saddam Hussein
5. Harry Potter book releases
6. Michael Jackson death
7. Steve Irwin death
8. Tsunami
9. Enron scandal
10. The Millennium
Oh, yes, you can argue, as they do here, that the concept of hypertext and memory extension can be traced to Vannevar Bush's wonderfully crazy data storage ideas in 1945 ...
And you can argue that the first online search engine was Archie (archives get it?), created in 1990 by a Montreal university student named Alan Emtage ...
And you can argue that Excite, introduced in 1993, and Lycos, Webcrawler, Galaxy and Altavista, all introduced in 1994, are worthy of mention ...
But the truth is that the only really important moment in search engine history that does not feature the word Google came in April 1994 when David Filo and Jerry Yang the Yahoo! Directory.
And now Yahoo!, the company with the exclamation mark in its name which has generated much debate about whether or not it is grammatically correct to use a comma after it to denote a pause, is celebrating its 15th birthday.
As part of its birthday celebrations, Yahoo! has produced a list of the 10 most popular searches in its 15-year history. The list is a fascinating insight into the things we think about. Take out the predictable disasters, and we are a banal lot.
The Yahoo! 15-year Top 10
1. September 11
2. Cloning
3. Iraq war
4. Saddam Hussein
5. Harry Potter book releases
6. Michael Jackson death
7. Steve Irwin death
8. Tsunami
9. Enron scandal
10. The Millennium
| 23 |
| Vote |





Add Comments
Comments (2)

Read More















