Indeed the first of them, the They were human-assembled catalogs of useful web links. Now, only bits and pieces of them remain (such as CompuServe forums), and for the most part, they're really only interesting to digital archaeologists.įortunately for early users, the first web designers set to work creating search engines. The Web quickly knocked out those earlier Internet search programs as well as online services like Prodigy, CompuServe, and GEnie. After all, we say, 'We Google for information,' not 'We webbed for the answer.' Yes, we use the Web for everything, but it's the search engines that make it useful.

WAIS, like Archie, Veronica, and Gopher, exist now only as Internet historical trivia. By 1993, just as Gopher reached its maturity, I thought the first real Internet search engine, WAIS (Wide Area Information System), was going to be more important than the Web! I was putting the cart before the horse. While Gopher was being built in 1991, the Web was also being created.

With Gopher, you could simply search and let the server worry about finding which site had the information you wanted. With Archie, you really had to have a clue that a file was somewhere on a given site. Archie was quickly followed by Veronica, a service from the University of Nevada System Computing Services that tried to provide Archie-style searches for plain text files.Īn even bigger advance was Gopher, which made it possible to search through online databases and text files. Archie was painful to use, but compared with what we had been dealing with, it was wonderful. The first major search advance was Archie, which beginning in 1990 made it possible to search through a site's file directories. Archie, Veronica, and other early search engines When I started using it, we had to go through FTP file directories screen by screen and hope that the file we wanted was in there somewhere. It wasn't until the late 1980s that the Internet became searchable. Today, you can get to ProQuest and OCLC over the Internet, but you'll find yourself blocked from getting very deep into them without permission.Īs for the pre-Web Internet itself, at first it didn't have search tools. The Matrix, as defined by Carl Malamud, is the superset of all interconnected networks. These systems, which are still around, are part of what's called the Matrix-and, no, I don't mean the movies. But when all you have is stone knives and bear skins, you make do.īefore I ever turned my hand to writing for a living, I put myself through graduate school by doing research on the very first online database systems: NASA RECON Dialog, now ProQuest, and OCLC. When I started using the Internet in the 1970s, it didn't look anything like it does today, and our search tools were primitive.

What are internet search tools