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."

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[Anonymous Coward]

How about with a Google Doodle?

It doesn't pay to be the first

[50000BTU_barbecue]

It pays to be the first when critical mass is achieved. Who remembers JCR Licklider?

Short memories

[w_dragon]

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.

Re:Short memories

[gstoddart]

Google wasn't the first by a long shot. By several years in fact.

But, they were one of the first ones to solve the problem of all of those web sites which had polluted every search by adding random words to meta tags or whatever they did.

When I first discovered Google, Yahoo had devolved into pretty much nothing but spam and irrelevant search results. It had become somewhat useless to use most search engines, because they never actually retrieved anything relevant to the search, just stuff which showed up due to those SEO idiots.

Google's page ranking managed to discard a lot of unrelated crap and actually get you something useful, and I never used Yahoo as a search engine again.

Of course, since then, Google's adherence to their own "do no evil" mantra has become a bit of a joke, and they've become really annoying about trying to force you to use more of their services even when you don't want to.

So much so that if I was ever within a few feet of Sergiy Brin he might get a kick in the nuts just for the fun of it. You know, just to show him what it's like and to show we care.

Re:Short memories

[h4rr4r]

I wish I could use the Google I first found. It now ignores all kinds of information and meaningful symbols.

Google code search should be an interface to normal google.

Re:Short memories

[93 Escort Wagon]

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.

Re:Short memories

[Anonymous Coward]

^ What he said. Altavista was pretty amazing for its time, and had some really interesting tools that went in a different direction than Google ended up going. Google went down the path of "our algorithm is magical, you will like our list of results". Altavista had a lot of neat algorithms correlating things, but they gave the user more insight. They had a graphical search-map app, for instance, that let you visually see clusters of related topical areas relevant to your search and drill into them...

Re:Short memories

[swillden]

I wish I could use the Google I first found.

You don't, actually. That version of Google was way too susceptible to gaming, er, SEO.

It now ignores all kinds of information and meaningful symbols.

Have you tried verbatim mode? That doesn't help with searches that include less-common symbols, but it does help with a lot of searches. AFAIK, Google always stripped special characters from searches and from its index, though, so I think you may be remembering an engine that didn't actually exist.

Re:Short memories

[h4rr4r]

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.

Yes, but...

[rodrigoandrade]

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.

Re:Yes, but...

[aix tom]

The most credit to the success of Benz, that resulted in the big Mercedes-Benz thing that is still very much relevant today basically goes to his wife.

There is somewhat of a startling co-incidence with Apple Products. There were a lot of people who build "cars" before Benz.

The "Patented Benz Motorcar" was basically a failure with no customers, until his wife loaded their two kids on board (without telling him) and went on a 212km (132 miles) round trip. That was basically the "Hey, a motorcar is not just a toy for geeks, even a mom can drive one" moment that started the commercial success.

That's true

[Chrisq]

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.

Re:That's true

[swillden]

I was also amazed at the relevance of the hits, but I still missed AltaVistas "near"-operator. It allowed you to find only results where one term was close to another.

Google does support wildcard searches. You can search for "foo * bar" (the quotation marks are part of the search string) and you'll get pages that have "foo" followed by some stuff followed by "bar". In that order, so it's not exactly the same as "near", but pretty close. You can also use OR, so:

"foo * bar" OR "bar * foo"

is pretty close to "foo near bar".

https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/136861?hl=en&ref_topic=3081620

archie

[redelm]

While not for HTTP resources, I believe the first search engine (for FTP) was `archie` at McGill.

Re:Google won because it was BETTER...

[dkleinsc]

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.