WebCrawler is a metasearch engine that blends the top search results from Google, Yahoo!, Live Search (formerly MSN Search), Ask.com, About.com, MIVA, LookSmart and other popular search engines. WebCrawler also provides users the option to search for images, audio, video, news, yellow pages and white pages. WebCrawler is a registered trademark of InfoSpace, Inc.
WebCrawler was the first full text search engine. It went live on April 20, 1994 and was created by Brian Pinkerton at the University of Washington. It was bought by America Online on June 1, 1995 and sold to Excite on April 1, 1997. WebCrawler was acquired by InfoSpace in 2001 after Excite, then called Excite@Home, went bankrupt. InfoSpace also owns and operates the metasearch engines Dogpile, MetaCrawler and Excite.
WebCrawler was originally a separate search engine with its own database, and displayed advertising results in separate areas of the page. More recently it has been repositioned as a metasearch engine, providing a composite of separately identified sponsored and non-sponsored search results from most of the popular search engines.