Slashdot Mirror
Jonathon Fletcher: The Forgotten Father of the Search Engine
PuceBaboon writes "If you were under the impression that Brin and Page invented the search engine while working out of a garage somewhere in Silicon Valley then think again. The first practical web-crawler with a searchable index, JumpStation, was running out of Stirling University, Scotland, twenty years ago this year, long before Google came into existence. In a tale all too typical of the U.K. tech industry through the years, JumpStation's creator, Jonathon Fletcher, was unable to find funding for his brainchild and commercial exploitation of the idea fell to others. Jonathon, who was a panel member at the ACM SIGIR conference in Dublin earlier this year is now quite serene about the missed opportunity, despite his frustration at the time. Meanwhile, Stirling University is quoted as 'now looking at a way to mark' Jonathon's achievement."
How about with a Google Doodle?
It pays to be the first when critical mass is achieved. Who remembers JCR Licklider?
Mostly random stuff.
Google wasn't the first search engine - not even close. Yahoo, Lycos, Altavista, and others already existed. JumpStation would have probably been crushed by Google just like all the others, even if it had found funding.
Brin and Page were the ones who made a profitable search engine.
Henry Ford didn't invent the automobile (that award went to Karl Benz a few years earlier), but he was the first to make a fortune building automobiles.
... not because it was first.
And Linux Torvalds didn't invent Unix or "open source."
Google won because it was BETTER ... not because it was first.
I remember when I first tried google. I had been using AltaVista and I was amazed at how much more relevant the Google results were. Primitive search engines seemed to just bring up any page that had a lot of the words in, Google's page ranking, and looking up related terms (you ask for "secured lending" and also get pages that say "mortgage") made a real difference.
An Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman each have an idea
The Guy from the U.S. funds, markets and makes the money.
While not for HTTP resources, I believe the first search engine (for FTP) was `archie` at McGill.
when you look at the first link on slashdot at the start of the day, and its already been visited.... :(
So unless his engine indexed a load of other services such as gopher and ftp servers too then it really was too far ahead of its time so you can see why it didn't garner much interest. Also I wouldn't be surprised if people didn't just think it was archie on steroids so why bother?
...but a software company I started, right out of collage, developed an online search engine (for BBSs) called MagiSearch in 1989 or so. It could crawl up to 32000 (i think i remember that number was related to how big the stack memory was in relation to our data structure in pre 32bit days) text files and pre-index every tokenized word and phrase into an btrieve "database" (pre-RDBMS and SQL) for lightning fast online searches and retrievals...the tech was pretty primitive but the damn thing worked really well. There is no doubt that no other product was out there at that time as we sold a bunch of these systems.
yeah i get it blah blah blah WTFCs... but the article reminded me about the whole experience and makes me question exactly *who* really created the first online search engine.
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
Was his first search engine using page-rank or something like that to bring relevant searches, or was it just a web crawler + grep?
Twenty years ago was 1993. I remember using the internet then, it was a bit Les profitable back then. There might have been a web browser that had images, but Usenet was where you downloaded them primarily. As in, download the file and open in another program. The web was almost all text (the T of html).
So, in a time when no one but hardware & software companies could make money on the internet, this guy couldn't make money off a website. This is not surprising in the least. Gas stations soul be a hard sell is the 1700s.
Also, there really wasn't much content to search back then. I'm fairly sure it would be less than a reasonable rounding error of the web today, scaling it up would likely be problematic. And it's doubtful the results were very good, one of the reasons Google dominated search was that it was much better at finding relevant information than Yahoo.
Congrats, good for him, and an impressive accomplishment with a novel idea. But it was way too far ahead of the market.
If it had been a matter of computer technology or public key encryption, all his work would be stifled under the Official Secrets Act and would not have seen the light of day until many others had independently discovered/created his epochal invention and financially benefited from it.
Sometimes it really does suck to be British....
The first search engine I used was the World Wide Web Worm (probably in 1994, I think). Before that, I used to use Archie quite a lot, which was a search engine for FTP sites (which you accessed via telnet).
The World Wide Web Worm found me a quite a few research papers which I needed to read to prepare the dissertation we had to do in the final year of our degree course. It saved many many hours of shuffling through paper in the library.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
I'd argue that Archie was the real breakthrough. Everyone else just took that idea and applied it to other protocols like http.
Now THIS guy should have had a software patent... just saying.
Same story .... A couple of people in a few different (and unrelated) places discover something within the same timespan, say a couple of months to a couple of years (I've seen even days apart). And then its a rush to a brevet (patent) . Also, many invention have been re-discovered over the years. Why is this a story anyway. I'ts been like that for ever.
This is a stolen sig.
There were many attempts to index the web and create search engines around that time. I find it a stretch to call JumpStation "the first practical" search engine.
In any case, the article is right that trying to get a high-tech company off the ground in Europe is an exercise in frustration. The UK is probably still better than the rest of Europe.
Yup, that is what I use to use to get around. And for "social networking" Usenet(1st rn then tin)
So the real question is:
Who wrote the first page ranked search engine and if they weren't Google then why didn't they end up dominating?
Seastead this.
Didn't mkgray code the Wanderer like four months before JumpStation? That's eons in Big Bang time.
When you go back in time past net.Genesis, hours can seem like days.
cause this article was written for them yung 'uns.. Brin and Page were latecomers, actually.. I still remember Mosaic, and crashy web pages, and a who;e lot of different search engines. If one couldn't find it, there was a completely dfferent algorithm that could, on one of the others like Jeeves or Altavista.. problem was they started loading up with so much advertising, badly written Javascript, and proprietary plugins like whatever flash was called before it was Flash... that when Google came along with that completely blank page, except for the search box.. it was an instant coup...
The Web and its attendant facilities, such as search, came as the culmination of decades or formative work. For Internet search milestones, check out Archie and Veronica. Anonymous FTP was the public document access method for the 70s and 80s. Archive indexed that world.
Dave Crocker bbiw.net
I had the idea in college to write a search engine, in 1990 or 1991. But I thought it would be "impolite" to go sniffing around on port 80. Just goes to show you how poor I am at making money. :-)