Like most technologies, operating systems – the software that runs on computers and allows everything else to work - keeps on changing fast. Most of us will have heard of Microsoft Windows, Mac OS or even Linux. However, the old dominance of these familiar operating systems is changing.

Cloud computing is being touted as the future by some, as demonstrated by the recent launch of Apple’s iCloud service that allows users to store data such as their MP3 music collection online. Cloud computing refers to the idea that people are storing more of their information “in the cloud” of the Internet rather than on their local devices. Google has been pioneering this with Google apps, a powerful service aimed at SMEs (small to medium sized enterprises) that stores all user data and applications on the internet, but many of the other big players are developing their own cloud services.

The web is huge, and it’s growing all the time. There’s a lot of useful information out there, as well as a lot of junk. But how can you find what you want? That’s where search engines come in.

Internet search engines have been around since 1990, when ‘Archie’ was first created by Alan Emtage. There had been a central list of webservers held at CERN, but it simply could not keep up with the number of new websites, and so the internet search engine was born. Archie was soon followed by other systems like Gopher and Web Wanderer. In the early days of the web there were also Search Directories like the first Yahoo! Website. These were manually updated lists of websites, and not true search engines.

Today, Google is the most popular search engine. As of April this year, 86.3% of searches were still made on Google, in comparison to 5.3% and 3.13% for Yahoo! and Bing respectively. Google has recently revamped its service, adding new options on the left hand side of search results, such as the ability to organise results by date amongst other innovations.