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.

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.

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