A sourced catalogue of 225 general-purpose public web search services and the 93 named operators behind them — from Archie in 1990 to SearchGPT in 2024 — assembled from 2,719 mentions across 1,360 web pages. The wave pattern is unmistakable: launches surged through the late-1990s portal boom and the 2000s, then thinned into a smaller, sharper generation of privacy, regional, independent-index and AI answer engines.
Colour is era. Larger pulsing dots are milestone services, named on the chart. Hover any dot for the service, operator, country and sourced fate. The small grey figure above each column is that year's launch count.
Nearly half the dated catalogue arrived in fifteen years: 48 services launched in the 1995–1999 portal boom and 58 more in 2000–2009. kiwix.enszfarms.org · en.wikipedia.org
Brands are not companies: 225 service brands resolve to only 93 named operators, and the 58 launches of 2000–2009 trace to just 23 of them — Microsoft alone appears behind MSN Search, Live Search and Bing, catalogued as separate brands. sk.sagepub.com · en.wikipedia.org
Origin country is unresolved for 153 of 225 records; the United States' 33 catalogued records and China's 8 are floors from the sources, not market shares. carmelon-digital.com · all4one.com
The newest wave is small but distinct — 11 launches in 2020–2026 from 5 named operators — while the era also closed a long arc: Ask.com, launched 1997, shut down on 1 May 2026. en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org
Archie searched existing FTP directory listings; the WWW Virtual Library and Yahoo! Directory were human-edited catalogues. JumpStation was the first to combine crawling, indexing and searching, and many early services were university projects, not companies.
AltaVista, Excite, Inktomi and HotBot industrialised full-text crawling, then consolidation swallowed most of them: Excite absorbed WebCrawler and Architext, Disney bought Infoseek, and Yahoo! later took Inktomi and Overture.
Google's link-based ranking and GoTo.com's 1998 keyword ad auction set the business model, while Baidu, Naver and Yandex held strong regional positions and Microsoft iterated MSN Search into Live Search and then Bing.
DuckDuckGo and Startpage made non-tracking search mainstream; Ecosia, Qwant, Mojeek, Kagi and Brave Search pursued mission, subscription and independent-index models; Perplexity, You.com and SearchGPT fused search with generative answers.
These records are held apart rather than given invented dates. A blank end year means active or unresolved — not confirmed active. Each chip links to its source.
One row per normalised service name. Blank cells are unresolved in the sources. Rows marked † are thinly sourced — only a name and a source page could be resolved — and are flagged rather than dropped. Predecessor and successor brands (for example MSN Search, Live Search, Bing) appear separately; clear spelling variants were merged.
| Service | Operator | Years | Country | Fate or note (as sourced) | Source |
|---|
Method — research catalogue of general-purpose public web search services, compiled 28 August 2026 from ten broad web searches: 1,360 unique pages scanned, 2,719 service mentions extracted, normalised to 225 service/brand records (158 with a sourced launch year, 93 distinct named operators; launch years span 1990–2024). Era totals: 18 before 1995 · 48 in 1995–1999 · 58 in 2000–2009 · 23 in 2010–2019 · 11 in 2020–2026 · 67 undated. This is a broad sourced catalogue, not an exhaustive census: brands and companies are not one-to-one, early projects were often university services, country is unresolved for 153 records (US/U.S./USA spellings appear as sourced), and a blank end year means active or unresolved. Founders and era columns were cut from the table for width; founders appear in chart tooltips where sourced. Every number and row links to a source page supplied by the research.