ALIWEB (Archie-Like Indexing for the Web) is the first Web search engine.
First announced in November 1993
by developer
Martijn Koster while working at
Nexor, and presented in May 1994
at the
First International Conference on the
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web (WWW or simply the Web) is an information system that enables Content (media), content sharing over the Internet through user-friendly ways meant to appeal to users beyond Information technology, IT specialists and hobbyis ...
at
CERN
The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN (; ; ), is an intergovernmental organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Established in 1954, it is based in Meyrin, western suburb of Gene ...
in
Geneva
Geneva ( , ; ) ; ; . is the List of cities in Switzerland, second-most populous city in Switzerland and the most populous in French-speaking Romandy. Situated in the southwest of the country, where the Rhône exits Lake Geneva, it is the ca ...
, ALIWEB preceded
WebCrawler
WebCrawler is a search engine, and one of the oldest surviving search engines on the web today. For many years, it operated as a metasearch engine. WebCrawler was the first web search engine to provide full text search.
History
Brian Pinker ...
by several months.
ALIWEB allows users to submit the locations of index files on their sites
which enables the search engine to include webpages and add user-written page descriptions and keywords. This empowers webmasters to define the terms that would lead users to their pages, and also avoided setting bots (''e.g.''
the Wanderer,
JumpStation
JumpStation was the first WWW search engine that behaved, and appeared to the user, the way current web search engines do. It started indexing on 12 December 1993 and was announced on the Mosaic "What's New" webpage on 21 December 1993. It was h ...
) which used up bandwidth.
Martijn Koster, who was also instrumental in the creation of the
Robots Exclusion Standard,
detailed the background and objectives of ALIWEB with an overview of its functions and framework in the paper he presented at
CERN
The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN (; ; ), is an intergovernmental organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Established in 1954, it is based in Meyrin, western suburb of Gene ...
.
Koster left Nexor and in the following years development ceased until a new company took over the project. It was discovered that the database file had actually exceeded the range of search so therefore when you entered a search term it would not search the entire database and weight the results, it would only search from the beginning of the database until it either ran out of results to show or exceeded the number of results requested. The new company developers fixed this by weighting the results and searching the entire database before displaying the results.
See also
*
World Wide Web Worm
The World Wide Web Worm (WWWW) was one of the earliest search engines for the World Wide Web (WWW). It was developed in September 1993 by Oliver McBryan at the University of Colorado as a research project. It is claimed by some to be the first se ...
*
JumpStation
JumpStation was the first WWW search engine that behaved, and appeared to the user, the way current web search engines do. It started indexing on 12 December 1993 and was announced on the Mosaic "What's New" webpage on 21 December 1993. It was h ...
*
Archie (search engine)
*
History of the Internet
The history of the Internet originated in the efforts of scientists and engineers to build and interconnect computer networks. The Internet protocol suite, Internet Protocol Suite, the set of rules used to communicate between networks and devi ...
*
List of search engines
Search engines, including web search engines, selection-based search engines, metasearch engines, desktop search tools, and web portals and vertical market websites have a search facility for online databases.
By content/topic
General ...
References
{{Web search engines
History of the Internet
Defunct internet search engines
Internet properties established in 1994