[1] Brian Pinkerton first started working on WebCrawler, which was originally a desktop application, on January 27, 1994 at the University of Washington.

[2] Starting on October 3, 1995, WebCrawler was fully supported by advertising, but separated the adverts from search results.

[2] Starting in April 1996,[2] WebCrawler also included the human-edited internet guide GNN Select, which was also under AOL ownership.

[7] WebCrawler was maintained by Excite as a separate search engine with its own database until 2001, when it started using Excite's own database, effectively putting an end to WebCrawler as an independent search engine.

[16] It was the second most visited website on the internet in February 1996, but it quickly dropped below rival search engines and directories such as Yahoo!, Infoseek, Lycos, and Excite in 1997.