JumpStation was the first WWW search engine that behaved, and appeared to the user, the way current web search engines do.[1] It started indexing on Sunday 12th December 1993[2] and was announced on the Mosaic "What's New" webpage on 21st December 1993.[3] It was hosted at the University of Stirling in Scotland.
It was written by Jonathon Fletcher[4][5], who graduated from the University with a first class honours degree in Computing Science in the summer of 1992.[6] 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.[6] At this point the database had 275,000 entries spanning 1500 servers.[7]
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.[7][8] However, 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[9], and presented its results in the form of a list of URLs that matched those keywords, JumpStation had the same basic shape as Google search.
JumpStation was nominated for a "Best Of The Web" award in 1994[10], and the story of its origin and development written up, using interviews with Fletcher, by Wishart and Bochsler.[11]
References
- ^ http://www.metro.co.uk/news/article.html?Why_we_nearly_McGoogled_it&in_article_id=582089
- ^ Archive of email sent to Matt Gray
- ^ Archive of NCSA what's new in December 1993 page
- ^ http://www.robotstxt.org/db/jumpstation.html
- ^ Early Spiders
- ^ a b "Scotland on Sunday/The Scotsman, 15 March 2009". http://www.scotsman.com/latestnews/Googling-was-born-in-Stirling.5073256.jp.
- ^ a b http://www.ambrosiasw.com/~fprefect/matrix/js.html
- ^ SearchEngineHistory.com
- ^ Oliver A. McBryan: GENVL and WWWW: Tools for Taming the Web, Oscar Nierstrasz (Ed.), Proceedings of the First International World Wide Web Conference, Geneva, Switzerland, May 1994 (Ref 9).
- ^ BOTW Awards 1994
- ^ Adam Wishart and Regula Bochsler: Leaving Reality Behind: etoys v eToys.com, and other battles to control cyberspace, Ecco, 2003, ISBN 0066210763.
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