Tweet

History of the Search Engine - What Came Before Google?

Written by: Jeff Casmer

Article Overview: Although we credit Google, Yahoo, and other major search engines for giving us the system we use to find the information we seek, the concept of hypertext came to life in 1945 when Vannaver Bush urged scientist to work together to help build a body of knowledge for all man kind.

History of the Search Engine - What Came Before Google?

Although we credit Google, Yahoo, and other major search engines for giving us the system we use to find the information we seek, the concept of hypertext came to life in 1945 when Vannaver Bush urged scientist to work together to help build a body of knowledge for all man kind. He then proposed the idea of a virtually limitless, fast, reliable, extensible, associative memory storage and retrieval system. He named this device a memex. But there is a long list of great minds that have given us the information system we now use today. This article illustrates some of them. Here is the History of the Search Engine:

Ted Nelson

Ted Nelson created Project Xanadu in 1960 and coined the term hypertext in 1963. His goal with Project Xanadu was to create a computer network with a simple user interface that solved many social problems like attribution. While Ted's project Xandadu, for reasons unknown, never really took off much of the inspiration to create the WWW came from Ted's work.

George Salton

George Salton was the father of modern search technology. He died in August of 1995. His teams at Harvard and Cornell developed the Salton's Magic Automatic Retriever of Text otherwise known as the SMART informational retrieval system. It included important concepts like the vector space model, Inverse Document Frequency (IDF), Term Frequency (TF), term discrimination values, and relevancy feedback mechanisms. His book A theory of indexing explains many of his tests. Search today is still based on much of his theories. History of the search engine uses some of the same techniques even today.

Alan Emtage

In 1990 a student at McGill University in Montreal, by the name of Alan Emtage created Archie; the first search engine. It was invented to index FTP archives, allowing people to quickly access specific files. Archie users could utilize Archie's services through a variety of methods including e-mail queries, teleneting directly to a server, and eventually through the World Wide Web interfaces. Archie only indexed computer files. With Archie, Alan Emtage helped to solve the data scatter problem. Originally, it was to be named "archives" but was changed to Archie for short.

Paul Lindner and Mark P. McCahill

Archie gained such popularity that in 1991 Paul Linder and Mark P. McCahill created a text based information browsing system that uses a menu-driven interface to pull information from across the globe to the user's computer. Named for the Golden Gophers mascot at the University of Minnesota, The name is fitting, because Gopher "tunnels" through other Gophers located in computers around the world, arranging data in a hierarchical series of menus, which users can search for specific topics.

Tim Burners-Lee

Up until 1991 until there was no World Wide Web. The main method of sharing information was via FTP. Tim Berners-Lee wanted to join hypertext with the internet. He used similar ideas to those underlying the Enquire (a prototype created with help from Robert Cailliau) to create the World Wide Web, for which he designed and built the first web browser and editor, called WorldWideWeb, and developed on NeXTSTEP. He then created the first Web server called httpd, short for HyperText Transfer Protocol daemon. The first Web site built was at

http://info.cern.ch/

and was first put online on August 6, 1991. Tim Burners-Lee created the World Wide Web Consortium in 1994. Tim also created the Virtual Web library which is the oldest catalogue of the web. The history of the search engine is a fascinating story.

Related Articles
  Seo Basics
  The Insider Secrets to Google
  Google the Great and Powerful
  Does your presentation pass the Google test?
  Search Engine Optimization

Article Tags: body of knowledge, e mail, feedback mechanisms, google, important concepts, informational retrieval system, inverse document frequency, mail queries, major search engines, man kind, mcgill university, memex, memory storage, project xanadu, salton, search technology, ted nelson, term frequency, term hypertext, vector space model



Related Forum Posts
What Do You Want To Be Taught? - Hi, My name is Jeff Foster, I will be moderating this new section. I want to get your opinion on topics you would like to discuss & be taught on. I see a great need for small business owners to learn how to perform basic Search Engine Marketing (SEM) which would include the basics about Search Engine Optimization (SEO). What do you want to be taught on? Jeff
Re: Search Engine Optimization - If you are interested to get more information about Search Engine Optimization you can visit Search Engine Watch site gives you a great way to keep up with what’s going on in the search engine world. This site provides a ton of information about a very wide range of subjects related not only to search engine optimization, but also the flip side of the coin; subjects related to searching online.
Re: Search Engine Tips and Ideas - Share Yours - Hi there, I answer this post, to start off. I am still learning a lot on all these subjects. Moreover, we have a wonderful tool to find out from previous posts. On the top right corner, use 'Advanced Search' and write 'Search Engine Tips'. It brings up all the previous posts with that information. Check it out. You will be surprised all the inherent information stored.
Search Engine Optimization - Search engine optimization or SEO is the method of optimizing your website to develop your levels within search engines. Some of these include items that you can do on your websites, through "keywords" that your possible clients are making use of to locate your business site inside the content of your web pages. There are means that will help out to establish what those keywords are, such as the Google Keyword Tool. This tool is intended for Google Adwords promoters, to assist them and understand what keywords to offer on for their advertisements. But it facilitates comparably for recognizing what people are looking for. Because the things that people actually seek out may not be what you would look forward to. The other component of Search Engine Optimization includes the things you place on other sites such as press releases, videos, images and different forms of content. The links that comes back to your website from these places thus will help your site's standing progress and get valuable traffic. And the more sites that have links pointing back to your site, the better. Part of the calculation that Google and other search engines use to rank your website is the number of links, and the “power” of the websites they’re on. There are several systems you can put together these links headed for your website from media distribution like articles, videos and various other types of media can include links to your website, so as you allocate them to more and more sites you will achieve more and more links back to your site.
Re: Can someone explain Search engine optimization to me? - Search Engine Optimization (SEO) could be compared to a big popularity contest: A High School Computer Geek and a High School Football Captain who are trying to promote a party. The computer geek tells everyone in school & even hands out 100's of flyers about his party Friday night...what happens? his friends end up showing up and a few new people...even the new people leave right away because it is not what they are looking for. The High School Football Captain ends up just telling a few good buddies, and within hours the entire school not only knows about it, but everyone wants to come, and everyone does come & stay. One defenition of "optimize is "To make as perfect or effective as possibe." How effective are your article marketing campaigns? Could you be distributing content (that is what search engines index) more effectively? In a perfect world, who would you want promoting your website, web pages, and web content? Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is determining this perfect & effective way to do this. Jeff


Share this article with your friends. Fund someone's dream.

Leave a comment below or share on the left and you'll help support entrepreneurs in Africa through our partnership with Kiva. Over $50,000 raised and counting - Please keep sharing! Learn more.

Tweet

Newsletter

Get advice & tips from famous business
owners, new articles by entrepreneur
experts, my latest website updates, &
special sneak peaks at what's to come!

Name:
Email:

Popular Articles

Are You Fulfilled

Executive Blind Spots

Living on The Edge of Chaos...

Suggestions

Email us your ideas on how to make our
website more valuable! Thank you Sharon
from Toronto Salsa Lessons / Classes for
your suggestions to make the newsletter
look like the website and profile younger
entrepreneurs like Jennifer Lopez.