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The Black Technologist Who Invented the First Internet Search Engine
- nl 10y agoOh I remember Archie! There was always a story it was named after the comic, and after it there were the Veronica and Jughead systems which were named the same way. I just checked then and Wikipedia says he didn't name it after the comic and hated it. So there goes another 1990's myth. Archie itself actually never worked very well, but nothing did in those days so we were amazed when it actually returned a result.
- macintux 10y agoI can probably count the number of dinner parties I've been to on one hand. The only one I remember is the one where, in the mid-90s, we discussed the fact that the web was wonderful but there was no way to find anything.
- Starwatcher2001 10y agoI recall using Archie, Wais and Gopher under MSDOS using clients pulled from FTP sites. Although useful, it wasn't until I discovered usenet that the world really opened up for me.
- noobermin 10y agoI was thinking, people proclaim that Google and internet search (like yahoo) in general precipitated the dawn of the internet, but what use is search if there's nothing to search for? Or at least no one knows what exists to search for?
- pelasaco 10y agowhat is the meaning of "The Black Technologist" ?
- anigbrowl 10y agoI loved Archie and it was still useful for a good year or two after the weww got going. Nice to finally learn who was behind it - back then people rarely shared photos of themselves since they took forever to download.
- zlatan_ 10y agoAnnnd they used the whitest photo of him they could find.
- aleksei 10y agoProvided by the man himself, as evident by the "Courtesy Alan Emtage" directly under the (whitest?) photo.
- thecatspaw 10y agoim not sure what him beeing black has to do with the first search engine
- jacmoe 10y agoBlack History Month - that's why.
- matt_wulfeck 10y agoHe's from Barbados. I'm glad the article didn't mistakingly call him an African American. Though black history month is also called African-American History Month.
- h4nkoslo 10y agoYou might be surprised, but in the American context numerous people considered "black" for political reasons clearly have microscopic amounts of black admixture. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katherine_Johnson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katherine_Johnson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamala_Harris https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamala_Harris https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Butterfield https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Butterfield https://twitter.com/mayorvincegray https://twitter.com/mayorvincegray https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Jealous https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Jealous
- rhcom2 10y agoYou can't necessarily discern a person's racial makeup from just their skin tone so assuming these people have "microscopic amounts of black admixture" seems pretty ignorant. Basically you just made a list of light skin black people.
- Diederich 10y agoNeat. I clearly recall connecting to archie.au and archie.nz to do (slow-ass!) searches back in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Why those? Easy to remember!
- neoeldex 10y agoI don't get the title. Does it matter what color the man was? In an article about TBL I also don't expect a title beginning with 'The white man whom ....'
- happy-go-lucky 10y ago> it’s worth revisiting that past during Black History Month
- steve_b 10y agoWhy so sexist? Does it matter that it was a man? "The sentient being who invented the first search engine" would have more appropriate.
- gmarx 10y agowhy so sentientist?
- austin_coder 10y agoYes, it matters. The gender and racial identities of underrepresented populations is relevant to a whole host of readers, including researchers, educators, social scientists, etc. Relevant: http://www.vox.com/identities/2017/2/7/14503144/white-history-month-black-history-month-white-pride-nationalism-racism http://www.vox.com/identities/2017/2/7/14503144/white-histor...
- sebtoast 10y agoNot related but Montreal is mentioned every once in a while on HN but I still feel a bit of pride every time.
- pg_is_a_butt 10y agoracism is racist.
- tomp 10y agoI don't understand why one would point out a person's race (unless it's relevant to the situaiton), but since the title did... I cannot fanthom how anyone could call this person "black". If anything, his complexion is similar to what US people call "hispanic" (although to me that's just southern European, not a distinct race).
- SolaceQuantum 10y agoBlack in this context is a race, which is an extremely broad spectrum of ethnicities and nationalities of various skin tones.
- weberc2 10y agoIn any case, I don't know anyone who would consider this man to be black. Perhaps it's the lighting or angle of the photo?
- pessimizer 10y agoIs who you know relevant?
- weberc2 10y agoYes, because it's a sample of human racial perceptions, but at any rate "who I know" isn't the sample I quoted, it was "who I know of", and the latter is a larger sample than the former. Further, "who I know of" is a pretty good informal indicator given that I know of mostly Americans (and a particularly diverse group of Americans at that). Perhaps you mean "is this sample statistically significant?", in which case the answer is "No, and I never pretended otherwise".
- SolaceQuantum 10y agoWell, like I said. Black is a race, not necessarily a skin tone but mostly identified as a complex and arbitrary delineation of class, nationality, ethnicity, and general skin tone as the easiest identifier but not necessarily the qualifier. I have a white friend who's tan as hell, and studied under a woman from South Africa who was about as tan as my friend. The woman was considered a black woman, while my friend was considered a white man, even though their skin tones were similar. Life is full of such arbitrary nuance and complexity.
- EJTH 10y agoWhy is the race of the man relevant? Seems a bit odd to point it out in the title that he was of presumably african heritage?
- intopieces 10y agoIf your question is honest, I'll give you an honest answer: When you're a member of a minority that is commonly portrayed in the media as being an 'other' / 'not good enough' / 'not likely to succeed', this kind of identification is heartening. It shows you that people like you can succeed, people like you have succeeded, and people like you matter. I'm going to go ahead and assume you're not a part of a group that experiences this, and that's why you're asking this question. This is me assuming the best in your comment. Be aware, though, that lots of times when this question is asked, the underlying sentiment is: "I'm tired of hearing about race," or "why can't everyone just shut up about what group they belong to." So the next time you ask that question or hear it being asked, be aware of how it's often heard. It might help you understand the potential reactions.
- gragas 10y agoI find it demeaning to make it a point that someone from a certain race "actually succeeded this time!" It seems to me that in doing so, one also indirectly makes the point that most people from race X don't succeed. It's good sentiment at best and racism at worst.
- intopieces 10y agoYou raise a valid point. Our celebration of "Minority successes" does often border on infantilization. This is a sentiment that comes up in the disability community: "I don't exist to inspire you, I just want to live my life and be respected like anyone else." It's a fine line. As more fields (I.e, CS) have visible minority successes, this need will fade. But we are not there yet.
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- nanodano 10y agoWhy is his skin color mentioned as part of the headline? Also, isn't Emtage a French name, and the guy doesn't look black?
- douche 10y agoUnfortunate title, since it's already dragging this into flamey territory... Any good information on the actual search engine? I'd never heard of it, it's before my time. TFA has about two paragraphs about it before bloviating into a philosophical discourse on the effect of search technology on society.
- firstworldman 10y agoHN is sometimes one of the more progressive wings of the geek community. It's disheartening to see the number of replies expressing dismay at race being an interesting and notable part of this story. Representation is a crucial concept in history and media, and a key element in why conversations about privilege are necessary. Rather than stating that you don't know why it would be relevant to mention the man's race, why don't you just actually ask yourself the question? Why does it matter that he is black? You all are great problem solvers. I think you can come up with some interesting answers.
- gpawl 10y agoHN has diverse commenters, some "progressive", some "libertarian", and some "concervative"
- dleslie 10y agoThere's a fair number of programmers here, and they use regex; why does race matter? Well, now we have two problems. ;)
- treehau5 10y agoRemoving my comments because this thread has sparked unnecessary discourse and reactions that this comment is the cause of.
- djtriptych 10y agoProbably much healthier to celebrate diversity than pretend it does not exist.
- treehau5 10y ago[removed]
- djtriptych 10y agoIt's irresponsible to mention quotas and affirmative action, but not the systemic (and legal) racism and sexism that made those programs necessary in the first place.
- julienchastang 10y agoI vaguely remember Archie. On the topic of early web search, does anyone remember "Jump Stations"? They were basically collections of curated web links (as I recall, 25 years out now).
- danbruc 10y agoThis escalated quickly. But I would actually somewhat side with the commenters saying that it is odd to explicitly mention the race in the article. I get that it is Black History Month in the US and in that context it seems appropriate but I would question whether having a Black History Month is a good idea in the first place. It is not obvious to me that explicitly pointing out a distinction is the best way to get rid of said distinction, be it black or white, male or female, gay or straight. It is a historical accident that one of the groups in each case was at a disadvantage in the past and that this continuous on to today with the gap narrowing slower than one may want. So I understand that it seems warranted to give the disadvantaged group special attention to close the gap as fast as possible. But does this necessarily require pointing out the distinction in the way this article or Black History Month does? Sure, any program targeting a specific group can not totally avoid making use of the addressed distinction, but would it not be better to keep this as inconspicuous as possible?
- maxerickson 10y agoThere are not many efforts to get rid of distinctions. People mostly work to get rid of unfair discrimination that is based on an arbitrary distinction.
- danbruc 10y agoThat is of cause what I was referring to, you would certainly not attempt to get rid of different skin colors, sexes or sexual orientations to achieve equal treatment for all.
- Nomentatus 10y agoWhy mention his race 'cause there's no such thing as unconscious bias and Valley funding and hires are as diverse as society is and... ah... oops, no, wait...
- danbruc 10y agoThis did not really add something to what I said, I did not deny the existence of the problem. You have to argue why mentioning the race is helpful, why it helps to reduces biases. Why does it not do the opposite, why does mentioning the race not reinforce its importance?
- kinsho 10y agoSad to see some people here be upset at the harmless mention of a subject's race. Though it is proof positive to me that even a community as dedicated towards intellectual pursuits like Hacker News has its fair share of regressive elements as well.
- noobermin 10y agoWas just thinking this earlier this week, can anything, at this point, hold a candle to Google in terms of search? Or possibly compete well with it such that people could switch? Recently heard about the news Google is discontinuing enterprise site search, not that that is such a huge problem, but it's just another example of the issues that arise from having a monopoly control everything with no alternatives. They can pull the plug and everyone is left lacking.
- Nomentatus 10y agoThe cost of entry in the search market just went way, way up due to Google implementing neural nets extensively in its search algorithms (Deep Mind whatever.) No question about that. Someone else might find a way to do that better, however; if so they could now take the market away. (But that doesn't mean I think that's likely.)
- tyingq 10y agoThe years of collected data on personalizing search results, what different demographics expect, etc...Is a big barrier as well. I believe they are able, for example, to know I want "Apache" the software organization even if I've never typed it before, because they've seen my previous software related searches. And...Injected some behavior based on searches by other people like me. Someone else is getting much different results for the same term...Again, even if it's for the first time. When I hear people say they don't like duckduckgo's results for a search term, it seems to usually trace back to "no tracking equals no personalization".
- Nomentatus 10y agoI agree with all of that. I think it's all well known. Which is why I said I'm not saying that someone overtaking Google is likely - just more possible now.
- jandrese 10y agoOne of the things I love on the old Internet is how people took off with the Archie theme on other search engines. Gopher's main search engine was Veronica (Very Easy Rodent Oriented Internet Something Something). I also recall a Jughead search engine. The second generation search engines killed the theme off (Altavista, Lycos, Webcrawler, Infoseek, etc...), but it was fun while it lasted.
- erikbye 10y agoReading "black technologist" my first thoughts goes to some malicious figure in a science-fantasy novel, not the color of ones skin. What is next, "the yellow programmer"? I'm so glad I don't define who I am based on my skin color. Is the color of your skin of any importance when we are talking about your achievements? If he was white, would making the first search engine be less remarkable?
- Kinnard 10y agoI think it's pretty important if the descendant of someone who was kidnapped and enslaved to provide for a legally enforced illiterate underclass is able to not only read and write but read and write code and make significant contributions to the field of software engineering. Like if someone who lost a foot won the 100 meter in the olympics, not the paralympics . . .
- esteves_ 10y agoMore propaganda.
- sunstone 10y agoThis concept does not conform with my confirmation bias.
- Animats 10y agoHere's the 1990 USENET announcement of "archie".[1] This wasn't a full text search engine. It just collected what it got from "ls". "Alan has a set of shell scripts that automagically calls up some subset of our list of servers each night (to keep load down on any one machine) and do a remote 'ls' on that machine. We cycle through the entire list in about a month, so no entry can be more than that old. For what it's worth, we currently know of about 210 sites." Archie allows anyone to rlogin into one of our machines and query our archive lists. Another one of my guys, (Bill Heelan, whe...@cs.mcgill.ca) wrote a bare-bones front end, which allows people to login, get a help message, ask for a specific string (using ed-like regular expressions) or get the contents of a specific archive server. Currently, archie is pretty brain-damaged. The files are stored as flat ASCII files and the "prog" command just launches a "grep" with the appropriate arguments. Future plans (once we get the latest start of semester out of the way) is to add a real database (we've compiled postgres (sp?) and Alan has started to code the program to parse the raw input). So that was Archie. That's like a library shelf list, or Active Directory, not a search engine. Long before WWW search engines, there were computerized keyword and catalog databases. The US National Library of Medicine (MEDLARS) and Mead Data Central (later Lexis/Nexis) were early big ones. Big libraries also had online catalogs by 1990. AltaVista was the first big full-text search engine. AltaVista was in the old telco building behind the Walgreens in Palo Alto. where PAIX is now. AltaVista was built as a demo of DEC Alpha servers. It was the first data center built telco-style, on open racks with the cables overhead. This was because they had the racks in place, but it became a trend. [1] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.archives/LWVA50W8BKk/wyRbF_lDc6cJ https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.archives/LWVA50W8...
- miraj 10y agothe OP here. as it seems there are some queries in peoples' mind re: the article's title; I am copying below the author's thoughts (from her social media feed) about the article, which I think is useful. "My latest piece for JSTOR Daily looks at a hugely influential technologist who is strangely absent from most lists of Black inventors. Alan Emtage invented the world's first search engine -- so I look at the massive impact of search, not only on how the web works, but how our brains work, too." P.s. Am notifying the author about the discussion here. If she has time & so inclined, to engage. P.p.s. as for myself, I was hoping to see interesting HN discussion about search before pre-Google, & how search is affecting our brain + thinking process.