History of the Term "Search Engine"

When trying to find the earliest journalistic use of the term "search engine", I didn't see anything scanning the Los Angeles Times archives. Luckily enough, I found one article in the Chicago Tribune dating back to 1988 that talked about how CD-ROMS used search engines only programed to their software. This meant that there was not a universal, cross-system search engine at the time. However, the article does say that hypertext is a search engine that developers should consider. In The New York Times, the earliest article I could find was from 1996. Titled "New Internet Search Engine Said to Ease Hunt for Sites", the article introduces a new search engine called HotBot that was supposed to be better than Yahoo and Alta Vista. Clearly, HotBot didn't pan out as planned.

Using ProQuest, the earliest date I could find was from InfoWorld in late 1995 to early 1996,  where a new search engine by the name of Verity was discussed. This engine was said to include "the capability to automatically cluster retrieved documents according to their contents. The Project MUSE link was not working for me, so I did not find anything. With JSTOR, I was able to find my oldest article yet, dating all the way back to Fall 1987. It discusses the possibility of high-speed search engines for archive systems, much like the ones I'm using for this blog post.

After going over all the results, the definition of a search engine relatively means the same thing today as it did as its inception. However, in today's world, it is important to look at the algorithms in place that define a search such as PageRank, location, and search history. It was very interesting to see the search engines discussed in early articles such as HotBot because they clearly are not relevant anymore. Also, it's funny how I was using search engines in order to research search engines. My thoughts.