The first web search engine to index the full text of pages was WebCrawler.
Created by Brian Pinkerton at the University of Washington, WebCrawler began as a project in January 1994 and launched publicly later that year. It used automated crawling to collect page content and let users search for words appearing anywhere in indexed pages.
Earlier tools such as W3Catalog, Aliweb, and JumpStation helped users discover websites, but they generally relied on directories, submitted indexes, or limited fields such as titles and headings. WebCrawler’s full-text approach was a major shift toward the search experience people recognize today.
WebCrawler became popular quickly, was acquired by AOL in 1995, and later by Excite in 1997. It remained a separate service for several years before using Excite’s database in 2001. It is sometimes confused with Lycos or AltaVista, which were also important early search engines but did not precede WebCrawler’s full-text breakthrough.