Vs. 

“The Internet is nothing more than the result of some visionary thinking by people in the early 1960’s who saw great potential value in allowing computers to share information on research and development in scientific and military fields.”

            In the late 1950’s, ARPA (Advanced Research Projects) was created as a part of the Department of Defense to gain leadership in science and technology relevant for use in the military. The main focus of ARPA was to come up with a course of action for the United States to retain control over its missiles if a nuclear attack was to happen. In 1972, what is known as the ARPANET (INTERNET nowadays) was available for the public to use. Twenty years after the creation of the Internet, the World Wide Web came about with a purpose to allow the public exchange of data on a global basis. Now everything was created, primitively, but created. With tons of data and information being shared on a global basis, the need to find a specific piece of information amongst all being shared in a timely manner was great.

            To solve this problem, “Archie” was introduced in 1990, a primitive tool for internet search. Peter Deutsch, developer of “Archie”, always insisted that “Archie” was short for Archiver, and had nothing to do with the comic strip. It’s basic “trick” was to create a searchable database of filenames from directory listings of all the files on public anonymous FTP (File Transfer Protocol) sites.

“Archie’ had such popularity that other visionary groups started to created their own “search engines”. The University of Nevada System Computing Services developed and launched their own “search engine” called “Veronica” (Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-Wide Index to Computerized Archives). Soon after “Veronica”, another “primitive search engine” was launched by the name of “JugHead” (Jonzy’s Universal Gopher Hierarchy Excavation and Display). The two new user interfaces searched files stored in “Gopher” index systems. The major difference between “Gopher” and “Archie” is that“Gopher” indexed plain text documents, while “Archie” indexed computer files.

In 1993, the web’s first robot was introduced. Matthew Gray introduced the World Wide Web Wanderer to the world. Its initial purpose was to measure the size of the web by counting web servers. Later, it was used to obtain URL’s, forming the first database of Web sites called Wandex. Computer robots are simply programs that automate repetitive tasks at speeds impossible for humans to match. When robots were first introduced, it created a little controversy because it used enormous amounts of bandwidth, due to the fact that it accessed the same page hundreds of times a day. Gray later revised the robot and fixed the bandwidth problem, but by then people were questioning the value of bots.

A bright young man by the name of Martjn Koster, created something that worked better than the World Wide Wanderer/Wandex, and called it ALIWEB. ALIWEB allowed users to submit their pages they wanted indexed with their own page description. By doing this, it eliminated the bot to collect data and it was not using enormous amount of bandwidth to perform basically the same task.

By the late 1993, three full bot fed search engines had dominated the web: JumpStation, the World Wide Web Worm, and the RBSE spider (Repository-Based Software Engineering). The distinction between JumpStation and World Wide Web Worm is that JumpStation collected data info about the title and header from web sites, World Wide Web Worm indexed titles and URL’s. While JumpStation and WWW Worm listed results in order they found them, RSBE included a ranking system in results found. Although this was the beginning of the “search engine era”, if you did not know the exact name of what you are trying to search, it would be extremely hard to locate what you were looking for since early search problem-solving computer programs did not executed proper link analysis or stored full page content.