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
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