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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.
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.
Yea, I created the 'Classroom Door' for BBS's back in the 80's. It was a display of 12 or 16 virtual desks with space for 10 or so lines. So you could post a short, 2 line message on your desk or put messages on friends' desks. The older messages would scroll off the virtual desk as new ones were posted.
Precursor to Twitter maybe? Facebook?
[John]
Shit better not happen!
AC brings up a legitimate point: All search engines are involved in a race between themselves and those trying to spam the results.
In the very early days of the WWW, there were a smattering of sites, with actual content, so the basic word-counting approach was fine. Then the spammers showed up, saw the potential of spamming search engines, saw that they were doing word-counting, and just filled their pages with search terms repeated about 300 times, and poof, those search engines were useless.
Then Google came in, and for the first time focused not on what the contents of the page were but instead on what the links to that page said. This was vulnerable too, to Google bombing, but it was far less vulnerable to SEO spammers, so it was a big improvement. As Google grew, it put a lot of resources into trying to prevent SEO spamming. It's not wholly successful, but the fact is that it's better at it than anyone else.
I am officially gone from
Not to detract from your accomplishment, but to clarify, 1989 was not pre-SQL; SQL dates back to the early 70s and became an ANSI standard in 1986. Commercial RDBMS's based on SQL were available as early as 1979. There might not have been any open source SQL databases back then, though.
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.