Search Engine Trivia
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46 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 46 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What did Vannevar Bush call his hypothetical desk-sized information machine of 1945, a forerunner of hypertext?
the memex
Bush described the memex, a desk that stored books and records on microfilm linked by associative 'trails', in his July 1945 Atlantic Monthly essay 'As We May Think'.
Q 02What 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 03HotBot, launched in 1996 on Inktomi's technology, was created by which magazine?
Wired
Wired magazine's online arm HotWired launched HotBot in May 1996, running on Inktomi's search technology.
Q 04Before 1993, how was the list of existing World Wide Web servers maintained?
By hand
It was kept By hand: Tim Berners-Lee edited the list of web servers hosted at CERN, and NCSA announced new ones on its 'What's New' page.
Q 05Matthew Gray's 1993 World Wide Web Wanderer, probably the first web robot, was built to do what?
measure the size of the web
Matthew Gray wrote the Wanderer at MIT to measure the size of the web; its crawls fed an index called Wandex, and it kept running until late 1995.
Q 06Which December 1993 tool was the first to combine crawling, indexing and querying in a web search engine?
JumpStation
JumpStation, written by Jonathon Fletcher at the University of Stirling, used a robot to crawl and index pages and a web form to query them.
Q 07Which 1994 search engine was among the first to let users search any word on any web page?
WebCrawler
WebCrawler, launched by Brian Pinkerton at the University of Washington in April 1994, offered the first public full-text index of web pages.
Q 08Lycos, 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, the Latin family name of the wolf spider; Michael Mauldin started it as a Carnegie Mellon research project.
Q 09Yahoo!, founded in January 1994 by Jerry Yang and David Filo, began as what kind of product?
a web directory
Yahoo! started as a web directory, a hierarchy of links sorted into categories by its editors; the search added in 1995 covered only those listings.
Q 10AltaVista was created by researchers at which computer company, partly to show off its hardware?
Digital Equipment Corporation
AltaVista was built in 1995 at Digital Equipment Corporation's Western Research Lab in Palo Alto, partly to demonstrate its 64-bit Alpha processors; Yahoo shut it down in 2013.
Q 11How much per year did each of five search engines pay Netscape in 1996 to rotate on its search page?
$5 million
Netscape wanted one exclusive partner, but demand was so strong that five engines — Yahoo!, Magellan, Lycos, Infoseek and Excite — each paid $5 million a year to rotate on its page.
Q 12Ask Jeeves, founded in 1996, was distinctive for letting users do what?
ask questions in natural language
Ask Jeeves invited users to ask questions in natural language, such as 'Where can I find a hotel in Paris?', fronted by a butler modelled on P. G. Wodehouse's valet; it was later rebranded Ask.com.
Q 13Which small rival pioneered paid search-term advertising, an idea Google later adopted?
Q 21The verb 'to google' entered the Oxford English Dictionary in which year?
2006
The OED added 'google' as a verb in June 2006, with Merriam-Webster following that July; Google discourages generic use of the word to protect its trademark.
Q 22By 2012, roughly how many searches a day was Google handling?
3.5 billion
By May 2016 it was processing 100 billion searches a month.
Q 23Google's 2013 algorithm overhaul emphasising natural-language queries was codenamed after which bird?
Hummingbird
Hummingbird, announced in September 2013 around Google's 15th birthday, rewrote the core algorithm to weigh the meaning of whole conversational queries rather than individual keywords.
goto.com
goto.com, launched by Bill Gross's Idealab in 1998, auctioned search placements to advertisers; Google adopted the model for AdWords, and goto.com (renamed Overture) later sued over it.
Q 14As a Stanford research project, Google went by what nickname, because it analysed backlinks?
BackRub
Page and Brin called the project BackRub in 1996 because it analysed the web's 'back links'; the name Google came later, from a misspelling of googol.
Q 15The name Google is a misspelling of 'googol', a number written as 1 followed by how many zeros?
100
A googol is 1 followed by 100 zeros (10 to the 100th power); the founders wanted a name suggesting a vast number of pages, and their campus, the Googleplex, echoes googolplex.
Q 16Inktomi, founded in 1996, took its name from a trickster spider spirit of which people?
Lakota
Inktomi's founders Eric Brewer and Paul Gauthier named it after Iktomi, the trickster spider spirit of Lakota legend, a nod to the spider-like web crawler.
Q 17Larry Page's PageRank patent cites RankDex, developed in 1996 by which future search entrepreneur?
Robin Li
Robin Li built RankDex in 1996 while at IDD Information Services, scoring pages by their inbound links; he went on to found Baidu in 2000.
Q 18Whose garage did Page and Brin use as an office when Google was set up in 1998?
Susan Wojcicki's
They rented Susan Wojcicki's garage in Menlo Park in September 1998; Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun, had written the company's first investment cheque that August.
Q 19The very first Google Doodle, in 1998, told users the founders were away at which event?
Burning Man
The 30 August 1998 doodle put a stick figure behind the logo to show the founders were at Burning Man in the Nevada desert, a heads-up in case the servers crashed.
Q 20In 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 24Google's search information boxes, added in May 2012, draw on a database called the what?
Knowledge Graph
The Knowledge Graph, launched on 16 May 2012, began with some 500 million entities and tripled in size within seven months; it feeds the panels of facts shown beside results.
Q 25In August 2024 a US federal court ruled that Google's dominance in search amounted to what?
an illegal monopoly
Judge Amit Mehta found on 5 August 2024 that Google had maintained an illegal monopoly in general search, partly by paying Apple and others to be their default engine.
Q 26Bing, announced by Steve Ballmer in May 2009, replaced which predecessor brand?
Live
Bing replaced Live Search, the brand Microsoft had used since dropping 'Windows' from the Windows Live Search name; the line began with MSN Search in 1998.
Q 27Which home-grown search engine long competed with Google in the Czech Republic?
Seznam
Seznam, launched by Ivo Lukačovič in 1996, began as a catalogue of Czech websites and for years held a large share of Czech searches before Google overtook it.
Q 28The chatbot Microsoft built into Bing in February 2023, later renamed Copilot, ran on which model?
GPT-4
Microsoft confirmed in March 2023 that the new Bing ran on OpenAI's GPT-4, tuned for search under the codename Prometheus; early users found it strikingly argumentative.
Q 29DuckDuckGo, founded in 2008 by Gabriel Weinberg, takes its name from what?
a children's game
Weinberg took the name from a children's game, duck duck goose, saying he simply liked the sound of it; the Paoli, Pennsylvania company later built its brand on not tracking users.
Q 30Baidu's name comes from a poem written during which Chinese dynasty?
Song
Baidu ('hundreds of times') is taken from a Song dynasty poem by Xin Qiji about searching a festival crowd again and again for a lost figure; the company says it evokes persistent searching for the ideal.