Jonathon Fletcher: The Forgotten Father of the Search Engine 95
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."
Re:Short memories (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 [pressherald.com], 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.
That's true (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.
Re:Short memories (Score:3, Informative)
^ 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 (Score:4, Informative)
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:That's true (Score:5, Informative)
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