On January 15, Wikipedia will turn 10. Yes, 10 years old!
Looking back over time, the search engine game has been one of the the most rapid evolution on the internet.
Gopher dates back to the earliest days of the internet. Primarily a text-base (command line) interface, it severed well when academia was the primary beneficiary and searching scholarly papers was the intention.
Closely related early search engines were named Archie, Jughead, and Veronica. Archie is generally considered to be the earliest search engine focusing on FTP hosted files.
During the mid-to-late 1990s, Infoseek was a popular service. It was bought by the Walt Disney company and eventually became the Go.Com search engine. Later in the 1990s, Ask Jeeves was extremely popular with people posting actual questions - and the answers tended to be accurate!
Web 2.0 has both consolidated the search engines and fragmented the information on the web. Google remains the most popular search engine followed by Yahoo and Bing.