Introduction
In the old days when someone wanted to find a piece of information on the internet it was not as easy as it is today. Today all you have to do is to type certain keywords or keyword phrases in the search box of one of the major search engines and you will be presented with a list of the most relevant information contained into highly relevant documents. Years ago finding information on the web required a lot more effort from the users. Find out about the origins of search engines going back to Archie, gopher and the first real search engine named Wandex.
Gerard Salton (1960s – 1990s)
Very important was the contribution of Gerard Salton, who is the father of modern search engine technology. While working at Harvard with his team, Salton developed the SMART(Saltons Magical Automatic Retriever of Text) information retrieval system and included important concepts like the vector space model, inverse document frequency, term frequency, term discrimination value, and relevancy feedback mechanisms. He also wrote a 56 page book which is called “A Theory of Indexing” where he explains many of the tests conducted to improve searching and indexing.
File transfer Protocol
Before search engines came to exist people that wanted to share files on the internet had to set up an FTP server and if anyone was interested in retrieving any data from them he had to use an FTP client too. This process worked effectively in small groups but the data became fragmented as it was collected.
Alan Emtage The creation of Archie
In its infancy, the Internet was just a collection of sites that users could access to upload or download. If a user wanted to find a specific file he had to navigate through each file. There were some shortcuts but this required knowing exactly what you were looking for. That was until 1990m when Alan Emtage created an index of the files of the web that was first called Archie.
Archie was not a search engine but it allowed users to download a list of the files upload anonymous on the web and than those listings were then plugged into a searchable database of web sites. The search capabilities of Archie werent as good as the ones that are supported by major search engines today but the job was done.
Veronica
The success for Archie spread very fast that the University of Nevada System Computing Services group developed Veronica. Veronica served the same purpose as Archie but it worked on text files.
Mark MacCahill The creation of Gopher
In 1991, things were to get a lot better since a student names Mark McCahill, at the University of Minesota created Gopher, a program that indexed the plain-text documents that later became the first web sites on the public Internet. However, because there was also the need for a program to look for references within the indexes the both programs Archie and Gopher joined forces, in order to allow users to perform keyword search.
The first real search engine
The first real search engine, in the form that we know search engines today, didnt come into being until 1993. It was developed by Matthew Gray, and it was called Wandex. Waned indexed the files and allowed users to search for them. This technology was the first program to crawl the Web, and later became the basis for all search crawlers.
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