How Search work

How Search work – Internet search engines themselves predate the debut of the Web in December 1990. The Who is user search dates back to 1982 ^[1] and the Knowbot Information Service multi-network user search was first implemented in 1989.^[2] The first well documented search engine that searched content files, namely FTP files was Archie, which debuted on 10 September 1990.^{[citation needed]}

Prior to September 1993 the World Wide Web was entirely indexed by hand. There was a list of webservers edited by Tim Berners-Lee and hosted on the CERN webserver. One historical snapshot of the list in 1992 remains,^[3] but as more and more web servers went online the central list could no longer keep up. On the NCSA site, new servers were announced under the title “What’s New!”^[4]

The first tool used for searching content (as opposed to users) on the Internet was Archie.^[5] The name stands for “archive” without the “v”. It was created by Alan Emtage, Bill Heelan and J. Peter Deutsch, computer science students at McGill University in Montreal. The program downloaded the directory listings of all the files located on public anonymous FTP (File Transfer Protocol) sites, creating a searchable database of file names; however, Archie Search Engine did not index the contents of these sites since the amount of data was so limited it could be readily searched manually.

The rise of Gopher (created in 1991 by Mark McCahill at the University of Minnesota) led to two new search programs, Veronica and Jughead. Like Archie, they searched the file names and titles stored in Gopher index systems. Veronica (Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index to Computerized Archives) provided a keyword search of most Gopher menu titles in the entire Gopher listings. Jughead (Jonzy’s Universal Gopher Hierarchy Excavation And Display) was a tool for obtaining menu information from specific Gopher servers. While the name of the search engine “Archie Search Engine” was not a reference to the Archie comic book series, “Veronica” and “Jughead” are characters in the series, thus referencing their predecessor.