5 ms·

Jonathon Fletcher: forgotten father of the search engine (2013)

• johansch 11y ago
  It was probably a very neat hack (I didn't use it; my first search engine of choice was Webcrawler in '95. Then Altavista and Alltheweb (Norway, NTNU! First known as ftpsearch.ntnu.no.). Then omfg, this Google thing really works, '98 - "why won't they let me buy shares in their company"?) But I think Jonathon would agree that it was the obvious next step. There was already the (overly) academical WAIS etc.
• downer72 11y ago
  Jonathon always appears to be a misspelling of Jonathan. Like as if someone were promoting a Jon-a-thon.
• frik 11y ago
  "In my opinion, the web isn't going to last forever" sounds quite bitter.
• aplorbust 11y ago
  MOMSpider was the one I remember. What's interesting about web crawling is that it has always been controversial. Many website operators back then did not like crawlers. And that sort of sentiment continues to this day. The web has never fully consented to being indexed. This has always struck me as odd. Perhaps there should have been more thought about a bifurcation of "private" web and "public" web. Of course in retrospect the value of the public one seems far greater; Google's corporate wealth points to that conclusion.