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
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