A decade after Aliweb (www.aliweb.com) was created in October 1993, the Web’s oldest search engine is still functioning, albeit it nowhere near the standards of its modern-day successors.

Aliweb was developed by the United Kingdom’s Martijn Koster to provide Archie-like functionality in a search engine for the web. Aliweb does not have the robot functionality of Wanderer or other search engines and relies on web masters to post indexing information on sites they want listed. Most people don’t know how to supply the special indexing file required; therefore relatively few sites are accessible through Aliweb compared to robot-based search engines.