[at-l] Memory lane...

[tfort at jam.rr.com (Tom Fort)]

>  
>
>>Felix wrote:
>>
>>    
>>
>>>...It seems to me that way back in the early days of mass-marketed 
>>>internet access...Late 80's-ish...there was a search engine whose 
>>>name began with a 'W'. Does anybody remember that? What search engine

>>>is considered to be the first? Anyone know?
>>>      
>>>

Here a little something I just found.  Do a gogle on "first internet
search engine' and you will find papers on the subject by phd's! 

T.

==============================

The Archie directory service was the first Internet search engine,
according to the above definition (1). It combined a script-based data
gatherer to fetch site listings of anonymous FTP files with a regular
expression matcher for retrieving file names matching a user query.
Begun in 1990, Archie was a well-established Internet tool by 1992.

Archie's success as an index for FTP files inspired others to create an
index for Gopher menus, which are a means of sharing text files across
the Internet. The University of Nevada System Computing Services group
developed the Veronica system in 1993.

The first gathering program for the Web was the World Wide Web Wanderer
(2). Initially, this program only counted Web servers on the Internet,
but I later added a retrieval program called Wandex for searching the
Internet's output. The Wanderer ran twice a year, from June 1993 through
January 1996.

In October 1993, Aliweb (Archie-Like Indexing of the Web), an analog of
the Archie system, was developed (3). Aliweb requires the Web server to
prebuild an index of all Web pages on that server. The server must also
register with Aliweb. Aliweb provides a simple Perl-based retrieval
program to search the collected indices. As implemented, the site index
in turn relies on author-supplied descriptions of the items being
indexed.

In December 1993, three more Internet search engines became available:
JumpStation (4), World Wide Web Worm (5), and RBSE Spider
(Repository-Based Software Engineering) (6). JumpStation used a Web
robot, or spider, to gather information about the title and headers from
Web pages, and used a simple exhaustive match to retrieve pages. The WWW
Worm indexed only the titles and URLs, using a regular expression search
of the whole inverted index. These systems both produced a listing of
matching documents in database order, not ranked by any kind of
relevance to the user's query.

By contrast, the RBSE spider and the WebCrawler (which went on line
April 20, 1994) were the first Internet search engines to implement
ranked-relevance retrieval (7). By use of a vector-space retrieval
model, WebCrawler listed documents most closely related to the user's
query first, making the system much more usable and reducing the time
spent analyzing the searcher's output (8). The RBSE spider also
supported relevance feedback using WAIS (Wide-Area Indexing Service).