Bing (search engine) web crawler. In early 1999, MSN Search launched a version which displayed listings from Looksmart blended with results from Inktomi except for a short time in 1999 when results from AltaVista were used instead. Since then Microsoft upgraded MSN Search to provide its own self-built search engine results, the index of which was updated weekly and sometimes daily. The upgrade started as a beta program in November 2004, and came out of beta in February 2005. Image search was powered by a third party, Picsearch. The service also started providing its search results to other search engine portals in an
Database search engine Database search engine A database search engine is a search engine that operates on material stored in a digital database. Categories of search engine software include: The largest online directories, such as Google and Yahoo, utilize thousands of computers to process billions of website documents using web crawlers or spiders (software), returning results for thousands of searches per second. Processing high query volumes requires software to run in a distributed environment with redundancy. Searching for textual content in databases or structured data formats (such as XML and CSV) presents special challenges and opportunities which specialized search engines resolve. Databases allow