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."
It doesn't pay to be the first (Score:5, Interesting)
archie (Score:4, Interesting)
While not for HTTP resources, I believe the first search engine (for FTP) was `archie` at McGill.
Re:Short memories (Score:4, Interesting)
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:Google won because it was BETTER... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Yes, but... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.