The initial concept of non traditional, mass storage of data and research, which could be cross referenced and easily followed, can be traced back to post WWII days when Vannevar Bush's "As We May Think" was published in The Atlantic Monthly (July 1945). Bush was aware that human knowledge was moving at such a pace that it had become almost impossible at that time for traditional records to keep up in a form that could be useful for reference purposes. He called upon world scientists to work together and help create a body of knowledge for all mankind.
What Bush was essentially looking for exists today in the form of a modern day search engine. He proposed the idea of a virtually limitless, fast, reliable, extensible, associative memory storage and retrieval system. He named this device a Memex.
The World Wide Web came about as Bernes-Lee, an independent contractor at CERN, proposed a project in 1980 based on the concept of hypertext, to facilitate sharing and updating information among researchers. He went on to jointly build a prototype system named Enquire.
After leaving CERN in 1980 to work at John Poole's Image Computer Systems Ltd., he returned in 1984 as a fellow. In 1989, CERN was the largest Internet node in Europe, and Berners-Lee saw an opportunity to join hypertext with the Internet. He is quoted as saying; "I just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to the TCP and DNS ideas and ta-da! The World Wide Web". He used similar ideas to those underlying the Enquire system to create the World Wide Web.
Search engines were designed to search for information on the World Wide Web using keywords and phrases inputted on the internet by a web user. The search results are usually presented in a list covering multiple pages and are commonly called hits. The information may consist of web pages, images, information and other types of files. Search engines operate algorithmically or are a mixture of algorithmic and human input. Whilst the first few hundred web sites were created at colleges and universities around 1993, the first search engine "Archie" had already been in existence for approximately 3 years. Created in 1990 by Alan Emtage, a student at McGill University in Montreal. The original intent had been to name the search engine "archives," but it was shortened to Archie.
Archie helped solve this data scatter problem by combining a script-based data gatherer with a regular expression matcher for retrieving file names matching a user query. Essentially Archie became a database of web filenames which it would match with the users’ queries.
Archie’s popularity quickly spread and the University of Nevada System Computing Services group developed quickly developed their own search engine called Veronica. Veronica served the same purpose as Archie, but it worked on plain text files.
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As interest in this new technology grew and the popularity of the
search engines Archie and Veronica grew, a third user interface appeared called Jughead. Again, Jughead served a similar purpose to Veronica and both sent files via Gopher, which was created as an Archie alternative by Mark McCahill at the University of Minnesota in 1991. By December of 1993, three full fledged “bot” fed search engines had surfaced on the web: JumpStation, the World Wide Web Worm, and the
Repository-Based Software Engineering (RBSE) spider. JumpStation gathered info about the title and header from Web pages and retrieved these using a simple linear search. As the web grew, JumpStation slowed to a stop. The
WWW Worm indexed titles and URL's. The problem with JumpStation and the World Wide Web Worm is that they listed results in the order that they found them, and provided no discrimination. The RSBE spider did implement a ranking system.
Early search algorithms did not do adequate link analysis or cache full page content, therefore if you did not know the exact name of what you were looking for it was very difficult to find it.
In 1994 that changed and
WebCrawler was introduced. The key advantage of WebCrawler was its ability to search for any word on a webpage, and all major search engines that have come into being since have followed this precedent. WebCrawler was also the
first major search engine to be widely used by the general public.
Lycos was the second major search engine widely used on this basis. Launched in 1994 Lycos went on to become a major commercial endeavor.
These early search engines were the pioneers of search and have led the way in how we search for information on the modern day WWW. They have been followed rapidly and successfully by the big brand names that rule the world of search today, including
Google,
Yahoo,
Bing and literally hundreds more.
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