To provide some background and framework for the research question, it is important to understand the history and anatomy of search engines. In its infancy, the Internet wasn’t what you think of when you use it now. In fact, it was nothing like the web of interconnected sites that’s become one of the greatest business facilitators of our time. Instead, what was called the Internet was actually a collection of FTP (File Transfer Protocol) sites that users could access to download (or upload) files. In the early 1990s academics were using the Internet to store papers, technical specifications, and other kinds of documents on publicly available machines. The problem with retrieving something was that one had to know the exact name and address where the file resided in order to find it . By most accounts, the honor of being the first search engine goes to Archie, a pre-Web search application created in 1990 by a McGill University student named Alan Emtage. Archie, which is archive without the V, downloaded the directory listings of all the files located on public, anonymous FTP sites, creating a searchable database of file names . Using keywords, one could search the Archie database for the name of a document but not the contents.
The results led not to the exact article but only to a computer that contained it, where the user would have to search for the actual article . Gopher was a database archive created in 1991 by Mark McCahill at the University of Minnesota. It was named after the school’s mascot. Where Archie had used FTP to create a searchable database of computer files, Gopher was able to index the titles of plain-text documents .
In 1993 students at the University of Nevada developed a search engine that not only would find an article on the Internet but also would take the user directly to it, rather than just to the computer where the document resided. This enhanced search engine worked much like Archie, but substituted Gopher for FTP. Gopher was a popular and more fully featured Internet file-sharing standard than FTP .
These students, playing on the name Archie from the comic book, named their search engine Veronica (Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index to Computerized Archives). Still, the main limitations of both Archie and Veronica were that they would only search the title of the document, not the content. “From 1993 to 1996, the Web grew from 130 sites to more than 600,000” . Watching the growth of the Internet was Matthew Gray, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is considered a pioneer of the earliest Web-based search engine because he developed the WWW Wanderer. The Wanderer was different from any of its predecessors. Gray realized the Internet was growing faster than any human could track. The Wanderer was a program called a robot that would scour the Web and create an index of everything it found. Gray developed an interface that allowed searching the created index. “It wasn’t the greatest search engine that ever was, but it was the first search engine that ever was” .
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History of Search engine
The results led not to the exact article but only to a computer that contained it, where the user would have to search for the actual article . Gopher was a database archive created in 1991 by Mark McCahill at the University of Minnesota. It was named after the school’s mascot. Where Archie had used FTP to create a searchable database of computer files, Gopher was able to index the titles of plain-text documents .
In 1993 students at the University of Nevada developed a search engine that not only would find an article on the Internet but also would take the user directly to it, rather than just to the computer where the document resided. This enhanced search engine worked much like Archie, but substituted Gopher for FTP. Gopher was a popular and more fully featured Internet file-sharing standard than FTP .
These students, playing on the name Archie from the comic book, named their search engine Veronica (Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index to Computerized Archives). Still, the main limitations of both Archie and Veronica were that they would only search the title of the document, not the content. “From 1993 to 1996, the Web grew from 130 sites to more than 600,000” . Watching the growth of the Internet was Matthew Gray, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is considered a pioneer of the earliest Web-based search engine because he developed the WWW Wanderer. The Wanderer was different from any of its predecessors. Gray realized the Internet was growing faster than any human could track. The Wanderer was a program called a robot that would scour the Web and create an index of everything it found. Gray developed an interface that allowed searching the created index. “It wasn’t the greatest search engine that ever was, but it was the first search engine that ever was” .
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