History Of Early Search Engines

History Of Early Search Engines

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The internet in its current form grew out of the work that Tim Berners-Lee and colleagues created at CERN (The European Organisation of Nuclear Research) in 1990. They created the first website that could be connected between hypertext transfer protocol (http), a server and the world at large. The idea was to make it easier for researchers in remote locations to update and review research work.

As the wider world woke up to the possibility of FTP and more files started to come online then the need to index, record and sort the information became a pressing issue.

Archie the first Engine
Archie is seen as the first ever web search engine and was developed by students at McGill University in Montreal in 1990. It was a very basic system that used FTP to index and record file names that could then be searched using a Unix command. The database of sites was only updated on a monthly basis at this point. As the database developed a more user friendly interface was created so that web filenames could be searched. What had started as a local project developed into the first internet search engine.

The World Wide Web and Wandex
As the web started to develop and the number of websites started to multiply then the need to create a database of websites that was searchable as opposed to the ability to search file names alone. In order to achieve this the first web robot was developed. The world wide web wanderer was released in June 1993. Initially it recorded data on the number of web servers but this was later improved so it could capture the websites URL. The database collated by the World Wide Web Wanderer became known as the Wandex Index. The Wandex index was online until late 1995 but it is a question of if the Wandex was simple an index of the web or a search engine. Its creator has claimed that it wasnt developed to be a search engine.

ALIWEB & Web Crawler Search Engines are Go
The ALIWEB search engine was created as a response to the Wanderer by Martijn Koster. The name stands for Archie-Like Indexing of the Web. The major difference between Wandex and ALIWEB was the fact that ALIWEB database was based on submissions to the index and not from a robot or crawler collecting data. Users could submit their web address, a description and a selection of keywords. ALIWEB was launched in May 1994 ahead of Web Crawler. Web Crawler was the first search engine to offer full text search of it database.

Jumpstation
The next evolution of the search engine Jumpstation. Jumpstation was developed by Jonathon Fletcher at the University of Sterling in Scotland. It was the first search engine that todays web users would recognise. It returned a series of results based on a text based search. The issue was that the results were returned in the order that the web robot found them. There was no ranking applied so if you did not know the name of the site you were looking for then Jumpstation didnt make the process any easier.
Jumpstation only lasted as long as Jonathon Fletcher stayed at the University of Sterling and when he left in 1994 the project folded having indexed 275,000 sites across 1,500 servers.

Yahoo joins the party
Of the three primary search engines in use in the UK today Google, Yahoo and Bing the first to enter the fray was Yahoo back in April 1994. Yahoo started life as directory created by Jerry Yang and David Filo. It listed their favourite websites in a searchable directory. The one main advantage of Yahoo was that it had human edited description with each URL it returned. The founding fathers of Yahoo were students at Stanford University. As the size of directory increased then a fee was introduced for having your commercial site listed.

Yahoo was initial the biggest brand in search engines but this position was challenged and then surpassed with the launch of Lycos, Infoseek, Altavista and ultimately Google in 1997. Google changed the way in which the search results were ranked by focussing on inbound links. The history of Google is another article on its own.

Tony Heywood

About the Author:
Know the Net is a great site if you are looking for information on How to use a search engine or more general Internet Help.




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