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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. Tribute by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    How about with a Google Doodle?

  2. 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 gstoddart · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
  3. That's true by Chrisq · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.