While Google and Yahoo now claim the vast majority of search engine traffic, it has not always been so. In the early days of the Internet search engines were a dime a dozen and very few of them did the job justice. The Dogpile search engine was created to help make searching for information easier and more reliable.
What Is Dogpile and What Does It Do?
In the late 1900's, Dogpile was one of a handful of new search engines that differed significantly from all of the competitors of the day. Dogpile takes a different approach to finding requested search information.
The Dogpile search engine pulls results not from its own internal database of spidered Internet web site information, but instead pulls results from several respected search engines, analyzes these results, and then returns to the user a simplified and organized listing of the best ones.
This method of search is known as a meta-search, and although Dogpile was not the first such search engine on the Internet, it was one of the more popular and well respected sources for web search information.
Who Created Dogpile?
The Dogpile search engine was born in 1996 as a brainchild of Aaron Flin, a research attorney turned amateur programmer that was apparently upset at the disparity of results that were produced by the various search engines of the time.
On Dogpile's site information page in 1996, Flin mentioned that he was "frustrated with searching Yahoo and finding too few or no results and then trying AltaVista and getting 30000 or more documents." From this frustration Flin invented Dogpile by teaching himself how to write code that would work with the major search engines of the day including Yahoo, The World Wide Web Worm, AltaVista, Lycos, and several others.
By 1999 the Dogpile home page listed well over thirty different engines and databases that the Dogpile program (known as Arfie) accessed to deliver the combined meta search results. The Dogpile name, although uncorraborated, was most likely a humorous play on words to reference the search engine's ability to take in a whole lot of data, digest it, and use it to create useful information while disposing of the rest.
Now well over a decade old, Dogpile is an Internet search engine that has outlived many of it's former competitors. While not as well known as Google or Yahoo, Dogpile continues to trot along serving a modest yet dedicated base of users.
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