Web search engine Overture (which owned AlltheWeb and AltaVista) in 2003. Yahoo! switched to Google's search engine until 2004, when it launched its own search engine based on the combined technologies of its acquisitions. Microsoft first launched MSN Search in the fall of 1998 using search results from Inktomi. In early 1999 the site began to display listings from Looksmart, blended with results from Inktomi. For a short time in 1999, MSN Search used results from AltaVista instead. In 2004, Microsoft began a transition to its own search technology, powered by its own web crawler (called msnbot). Microsoft's rebranded search engine, Bing, was
Search engine technology Search engine technology A search engine is an information retrieval software program that discovers, crawls, transforms and stores information for retrieval and presentation in response to user queries. A search engine normally consists of four components e.g. search interface, crawler(also known as a spider or bot),indexer, and database. The crawler traverses a document collection, deconstructs document text, and assigns surrogates for storage in the search engine index. Online search engines store images, link data and metadata for the document as well. The concept of hypertext and a memory extension originates from an article that was published in The Atlantic Monthly