Today’s high-performance Internet search engines have been developed and refined in a remarkably short period of time.
Academics and scientists had rudimentary tools similar to search engines as early as the 1970s. However the amount of information they accessed is a mere drop in the bucket compared to what the average computer user can access today.
Just one search engine Google (www.google.com) has indexed more than 3.3 billion web pages as of October, 2003 an increase of 1.2 billion pages in 20 months – or 23 pages a second!
Shortly after Veronica’s appearance, another Gopher search tool called Jughead was developed by Rhett “Jonzy” Jones at the University of Utah Computer Centre. Despite comical appearances, Jones claimed Jughead stood for Jonzy’s Universal Gopher Hierarch Excavation and Display. Jughead had similar functionality to Veronica, but added Boolean search capabilities. However, Jughead restricted the search to individual servers.
FTP enabled Internet users to locate and access files or more correctly, folders of information located on FTP servers. Another protocol called Gopher existed to handle plain-text documents and these were stored on so-called Gopher servers. Gopher was created in 1991 by Mark McCahill and his team at the University of Minnesota and was named after the university mascot, the Golden Gopher.
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Veronica, the grandmother of search engines - 1993
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The Internet’s first search engine appeared in 1989 and was invented by Alan Emtage, a computer science student from Barbados studying at McGill University. Emtage dubbed his invention Archie, a contraction of the word “archives” to fit the shortened naming conventions of the UNIX operating system.
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Archie, the grandfather of all search engines - 1989
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