The goal of all search engines is to find and organize distributed
data found on the Internet. Before search engines were developed, the
Internet was a collection of File Transfer Protocol (FTP) sites in which
users would navigate to find specific shared files. As the central
list of web servers joining the Internet grew, and the World Wide Web
became the interface of choice for accessing the Internet, the need for
finding and organizing the distributed data files on FTP web servers
grew. Search engines began due to this need to more easily navigate the
web servers and files on the Internet.
The first search engine was developed as a school project by Alan
Emtage, a student at McGill University in Montreal. Back in 1990, Alan
created Archie, an index (or archives) of computer files stored on
anonymous FTP web sites in a given network of computers (“Archie” rather
than “Archives” fit name length parameters – thus it became the name of
the first search engine). In 1991, Mark McCahill, a student at the
University of Minnesota, effectively used a hypertext paradigm to create
Gopher, which also searched for plain text references in files.
Archie and Gopher’s searchable database of websites did not have
natural language keyword capabilities used in modern search engines.
Rather, in 1993 the graphical Mosaic web browser improved upon Gopher’s
primarily text-based interface. About the same time, Matthew Gray
developed Wandex, the first search engine in the form that we know
search engines today. Wandex’s technology was the first to crawl the
web indexing and searching the catalog of indexed pages on the web.
Another significant development in search engines came in 1994 when
WebCrawler’s search engine began indexing the full text of web sites
instead of just web page titles.
While both web directories and search engines gained popularity in
the 1990s, search engines developed a life of their own becoming the
preferred method of Internet search. For example, the major search
engines found in use today originated in development between 1993 and
1998.
No comments:
Post a Comment