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Prior to September 1993, the World Wide Web was entirely indexed by hand.
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The first well documented search engine that searched content files, namely FTP files, was Archie, which debuted on 10 September 1990. The first internet search engines predate the debut of the Web in December 1990: WHOIS user search dates back to 1982, and the Knowbot Information Service multi-network user search was first implemented in 1989.
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Link analysis would eventually become a crucial component of search engines through algorithms such as Hyper Search and PageRank.
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