Today in 1995, the AltaVista search engine, developed by researchers at Digital Equipment Research Laboratories, was publicly launched with an index of sixteen million documents from the domain altavista.digital.com.
AltaVista went on to become the first search engine to gain widespread popularity. On it’s first day, it served over three hundred thousand users. By January 5, 1996, the search engine handled over two million search queries a day and in November 1996, twenty-two million requests a day.
Google was founded on September 4, 1998. It has been the dominant search engine since the early 2000s and today it has about 91% share of the search engine market worldwide.