History of Webkruz
| September 9th, 2009A new search engine is coming out on the market called Webkruz. A lot of new people are checking them out. It is a concept that is being developed with a group of excited entrepreneurs who have had frustrations in their own web searching experiences. They spent some time brainstorming with programmers and investors and business people, and they came up with the ideas of a visual search engine. Of course on all engines you have to look at the screen of words, which you could technically consider as visual, but with Webkruz the results are pictures or screenshots of all of the matching results of the search terms.
They started this project as a sort of hobby, getting together around the hours of their full time jobs. When their ideas came more and more together it seemed like they really did have the makings of a major search engine. A lot of competition on the internet for search engines makes it difficult, but when you have a great product and marketing plan, there is reason to believe that this is for real.
The first search engines included Aliweb, JumpStation, and Lycos. For the most part these are unheard of anymore. When they were started in 1993 and 1994, a lot has changed in the internet world, including simple growth and complexity, to differences in consumer opinion and expectations. The current giant, Google, didn’t start until 1998. Other popular sites today include Yahoo! Search in 2004, MSN Search and Ask.com from 2005, and a growing Bing sponsored by MSN from earlier this year.
Before the days of search engines like these ones and Webkruz, there was a single list of all of the known webservers. This list was followed by an Internet searching tool coming from the word archive: Archie. The sites were not indexed like today’s searches, but instead the program held the FTP (File Transfer Protocol) file names and could browse that database. This started in a university in Montreal.
Several other similar programs were used as the list of servers and sites grew out of management. The predecessor of the system like we use today is considered WebCrawler, from 1994. It not only searched the file titles, but could search through the full text of any webpage, setting the new standard for online search engines. The late 1990’s internet boom included many search engine companies taking advantage of the new full text capabilities. They began to partner and contract with Internet Service Providers, web browsers and other similar programming.
Search engines use a program or algorithm, the details in their entirety are kept secret, in order to determine page rank of the results. If you want to be one of the first one or two sites to show up on Webkruz, your site must meet certain criteria in matching the user’s keywords as well as being a clean, well kept and reliable site.
Webkruz uses pictures or screenshots of the sites to help the consumers find exactly what they are looking for without having to open and close a bunch of the results. The screenshot can be enlarged when you scroll your mouse pointer over it so that you can see in more detail without actually launching to that page. They also help you out by sorting the results into subcategories within the searching terms. You can then scroll through those if you realize a more specific branch of what you were looking for without having to sort out the irrelevant results. It is an innovation in searching and we are soon going to see Webkruz used all over personal, business, and work computers nationwide.
