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
A mosaic () is a pattern or image made of small regular or irregular pieces of colored stone, glass or ceramic, held in place by plaster/Mortar (masonry), mortar, and covering a surface. Mosaics are often used as floor and wall decoration, and ...
"What's New" webpage on 21 December 1993. It was hosted at the
University of Stirling
The University of Stirling (abbreviated as Stir or Shruiglea, in post-nominals; ) is a public university in Stirling, Scotland, founded by a royal charter in 1967. It is located in the Central Belt of Scotland, built within the walled Airth ...
in
Scotland
Scotland is a Countries of the United Kingdom, country that is part of the United Kingdom. It contains nearly one-third of the United Kingdom's land area, consisting of the northern part of the island of Great Britain and more than 790 adjac ...
.
It was written by Jonathon Fletcher, from
Scarborough Scarborough or Scarboro may refer to:
People
* Scarborough (surname)
* Earl of Scarbrough
Places Australia
* Scarborough, Western Australia, suburb of Perth
* Scarborough, New South Wales, suburb of Wollongong
* Scarborough, Queensland, sub ...
, England, who graduated from the University with a first class honours degree in Computing Science in the summer of 1992
[Googling was born in Stirling](_blank)
The Scotsman, 15 March 2009 and has subsequently been named "father of the search engine".
He was subsequently employed there as a systems administrator. JumpStation's development discontinued when he left the University in late 1994, having failed to get any investors, including the University of Stirling, to financially back his idea.
At this point the database had 275,000 entries spanning 1,500 servers.
archived 28 March 2009 fro
/ref>
JumpStation used document titles and headings to index the web pages found using a simple linear search, and did not provide any ranking of results.Google Search
Google Search (also known simply as Google or Google.com) is a search engine operated by Google. It allows users to search for information on the World Wide Web, Web by entering keywords or phrases. Google Search uses algorithms to analyze an ...
in that it used an index solely built by a web robot, searched this index using keyword queries entered by the user on a web form whose location was well-known, and presented its results in the form of a list of URLs that matched those keywords.
Nominations
JumpStation was nominated for a "Best Of The Web" award in 1994 and the story of its origin and development written up, using interviews with Fletcher, by Wishart and Bochsler.[Adam Wishart and Regula Bochsler: Leaving Reality Behind: etoys v eToys.com, and other battles to control cyberspace, Ecco, 2003, .]
See also
*Aliweb
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 W ...
*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 ...
*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 ...
* Excite
References
{{Web search engines
Defunct internet search engines