50 free Search Engine trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Search engine trivia for the terminally curious, the SEO crowd, and anyone old enough to remember typing a question to a butler called Jeeves. The quiz starts before the web: Vannevar Bush's memex, WHOIS, and Archie, the FTP index written at McGill in 1990 whose name is just 'archive' without the v. Then the early web scramble: the hand-edited CERN list, W3Catalog, JumpStation, WebCrawler's first full-text index, Lycos the wolf spider, Yahoo's directory, and AltaVista built to show off DEC's hardware. The middle rounds are about the engine that ate the web: BackRub, the paper on 'The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine', the misspelling of googol, Susan Wojcicki's garage, the Burning Man doodle, PageRank's debt to Robin Li's RankDex, and 'to google' entering the dictionary. Later questions cover Bing and its GPT-4 chatbot, DuckDuckGo's privacy pitch, Baidu, Yandex, Naver, robots.txt, the SEO hats, and the 2024 ruling that Google's search dominance was an illegal monopoly. Questions run from easy to expert and every answer was checked against a reference page and carries its source. See also our Google, internet and technology quizzes.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In May 2025, roughly what share of worldwide search did Google hold, according to StatCounter?
About 90%
That month was the first time in over a decade it had dipped below 90%; Bing was second on about 4%.
Q 02What did Vannevar Bush call his hypothetical desk-sized information machine of 1945, a forerunner of hypertext?
the memex
The idea appeared in his Atlantic Monthly essay 'As We May Think'.
Q 03What was the first well-documented search engine, which indexed public FTP sites from September 1990, called?
Archie
The name is simply 'archive' without the v; it was written by Alan Emtage at McGill University in Montreal.
Q 04The Gopher search tools Veronica and Jughead were named as a nod to which comic-book series?
Archie
The earlier FTP engine had not been named after the comics, but its successors deliberately completed the joke.
Q 05Before September 1993, how was the entire World Wide Web indexed?
By hand
Tim Berners-Lee edited a list of web servers hosted at CERN; NCSA announced new servers under 'What's New!'.
Q 06Matthew Gray's 1993 World Wide Web Wanderer, probably the first web robot, was built to do what?
measure the size of the web
It generated an index called Wandex and kept measuring the web until late 1995.
Q 07Which December 1993 tool was the first to combine crawling, indexing and querying in a web search engine?
JumpStation
Jonathon Fletcher's creation used a web form as its query interface; Aliweb relied on webmasters submitting index files.
Q 08Which 1994 search engine was among the first to let users search any word on any web page?
WebCrawler
It built the first publicly available full-text index of a subset of the web.
Q 09Lycos, launched in 1994 as a Carnegie Mellon spin-off, takes its name from the Latin for what animal?
wolf spider
'Lycos' is short for Lycosidae; it began as Michael Mauldin's research project.
Q 10Yahoo!, founded in January 1994 by Jerry Yang and David Filo, began as what kind of product?
a web directory
The search function added in 1995 searched only the directory, not full copies of web pages.
Q 11AltaVista was created by researchers at which computer company, partly to show off its hardware?
Digital Equipment Corporation
The name means 'high view' in Spanish and reflected the team's Palo Alto surroundings; the domain was redirected to Yahoo in 2013.
Q 12How much per year did each of five search engines pay Netscape in 1996 to rotate on its search page?
$5 million
The five were Yahoo!, Magellan, Lycos, Infoseek and Excite.
Q 13Ask Jeeves, founded in 1996, was distinctive for letting users do what?
ask questions in natural language
Q 21In May 2010, Google's first playable doodle marked the 30th anniversary of which arcade game?
Pac-Man
It was created with Namco; regular staff doodles began when Dennis Hwang drew one for Bastille Day 2000.
Q 22The verb 'to google' entered the Oxford English Dictionary in which year?
2006
The American Dialect Society had named it the most useful word of 2002; Google itself discourages the generic use to protect its trademark.
Q 23By 2012, roughly how many searches a day was Google handling?
3.5 billion
By May 2016 it was processing 100 billion searches a month.
The valet Jeeves was inspired by P. G. Wodehouse; the site later became Ask.com.
Q 14Google adopted the idea of selling search terms in 1998 from which small rival?
goto.com
The move turned search from a struggling business into one of the most profitable on the internet.
Q 15As a Stanford research project, Google went by what nickname, because it analysed backlinks?
BackRub
The name Google came later, from a misspelling of googol.
Q 16The name Google is a misspelling of 'googol', a number written as 1 followed by how many zeros?
100
The founders wanted a name that suggested searching a very large number of pages; their campus is the Googleplex, after googolplex.
Q 17Brin and Page's 1998 paper was 'The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web' what?
Search Engine
The iterative algorithm ranks a page by the number and rank of the pages linking to it.
Q 18Larry Page's PageRank patent cites RankDex, developed in 1996 by which future search entrepreneur?
Robin Li
Li went on to found Baidu in China in 2000 using the same technology.
Q 19Whose garage did Page and Brin use as an office when Google was set up in 1998?
Susan Wojcicki's
Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun, supplied the first $100,000 investment that August.
Q 20The very first Google Doodle, in 1998, told users the founders were away at which event?
Burning Man
It was a heads-up in case the servers crashed; the first interactive doodle, a playable Pac-Man, came in 2010.
Q 24Google's 2013 algorithm overhaul emphasising natural-language queries was codenamed after which bird?
Hummingbird
The 2010 'Caffeine' rebuild had earlier moved indexing onto Bigtable for fresher results.
Q 25Google's search information boxes, added in May 2012, draw on a database called the what?
Knowledge Graph
Within seven months it had tripled in size, and by 2016 it could answer roughly a third of all queries, drawing criticism for unattributed answers.
Q 26In August 2024 a US federal court ruled that Google's dominance in search amounted to what?
an illegal monopoly
The remedies trial in 2025 weighed options including breaking up the company.
Q 27Bing, announced by Steve Ballmer in May 2009, replaced which predecessor brand?
Live
The lineage ran MSN Search (1998), Windows Live Search (2006), Live Search, then Bing.
Q 28Since a July 2009 deal, Yahoo! Search results have been powered by which engine?
Bing
Yahoo had earlier used Inktomi, then Google, then its own technology from 2004.
Q 29The chatbot Microsoft built into Bing in February 2023, later renamed Copilot, ran on which model?
GPT-4
Early users found it more argumentative than ChatGPT, sometimes to unintentionally comic effect.
Q 30DuckDuckGo, founded in 2008 by Gabriel Weinberg, takes its name from what?
a children's game
The company, based in Paoli, Pennsylvania, began marketing itself on privacy in 2010.