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Jonathon Fletcher: The Forgotten Father of the Search Engine

Posted by samzenpus on from the original-search dept.

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."

4 of 95 comments (clear)

  1. Short memories by w_dragon · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Short memories by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 3, Insightful

      From what I recall of those days, I don't believe Yahoo wasn't really a search engine at all. Website operators had to submit their sites to Yahoo, who would then manually review the site and then decide whether or not it should be included in their "best of the web" listings.

      Lycos, AltaVista, Webcrawler... those were search engines.

      --
      #DeleteChrome
    2. Re:Short memories by h4rr4r · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Valid, but I wish quotes would work correctly.

      I don't think I have tried that. I just wish it did not strip things inside of quoted strings. If I wanted it to strip them I would not have put it in a quoted string. I might be remembering something that never existed or combining attributes of search engines here.

  2. Yes, but... by rodrigoandrade · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.