JumpStation

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 12 December 1993[2] and was announced on the Mosaic "What's New" webpage on 21 December 1993.[3] It was hosted at the University of Stirling in Scotland.

It was written by Jonathon Fletcher, from Scarborough, North Yorkshire[4][5][6] who graduated from the University with a first class honours degree in Computing Science in the summer of 1992[7] and has subsequently been named "father of the search engine".[8]

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.[7] At this point the database had 275,000 entries spanning 1,500 servers.[9]

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.[9][10] However, JumpStation had the same basic shape as Google search 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,[11] and presented its results in the form of a list of URLs that matched those keywords.

JumpStation was nominated for a "Best Of The Web" award in 1994[12] and the story of its origin and development written up, using interviews with Fletcher, by Wishart and Bochsler.[13]

References

  1. ↑ Why we nearly McGoogled it Metro, March 15, 2009
  2. ↑ Archive of email sent to Matt Gray
  3. ↑ Archive of NCSA's What's New, December 1993
  4. ↑ The Web Robots Pages: JumpStation
  5. ↑ Robots, Spiders and Wanderers: Finding Information on the Web archived March 28, 2009 from the original
  6. ↑ Miller, Joe (September 3, 2013). "Jonathon Fletcher: forgotten father of the search engine". BBC News. Retrieved September 10, 2013.
  7. 1 2 Googling was born in Stirling The Scotsman, 15 March 2009
  8. ↑ "Jonathon Fletcher: forgotten father of the search engine". BBC News. 3 September 2013.
  9. 1 2 Matrix, Search Engines: JumpStation archived March 28, 2009 from the original
  10. ↑ SearchEngineHistory.com
  11. ↑ 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).
  12. ↑ Best of the Web '94: Best Navigational Aid Best of the Web
  13. ↑ Adam Wishart and Regula Bochsler: Leaving Reality Behind: etoys v eToys.com, and other battles to control cyberspace, Ecco, 2003, ISBN 0-06-621076-3.
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