4 ms·

How we searched before search (2017)

36 points by dbrereton 4y ago

eesmith 4y ago
> But in the early 90’s, nothing like this existed on the web. The concept, however, was not unheard of. Archie was a system that used crawling to help users find FTP files, and is commonly known as the Internet’s first search engine. There's also Veronica - a play on the Archie comic strip - which crawled gopherspace. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veronica_(search_engine) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veronica_(search_engine) But I actually came here to mention a different sort of search that existed around 1994 or so. Someone had a modified version of Mosaic which would crawl and search all documents which were one or two links away from the current URL. That is, if you are on, say, https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/how-we-searched-before-search/ https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/how-we-searched-before-search... and did a search for "Veronica" then it would look search that page, and then find and follow all of the links in the page and search them. And even repeat for another link. This would help if you remembered that you found X connected to Y, and while you can remember X you don't quite remember where Y was. > At the time, NCSA was best known for Mosaic, later Netscape Navigator, later Mozilla Firefox. Their own link says that "Netscape’s browser was a complete rewrite of Mosaic. ... The newly formed company didn’t have a right to any of the code that their programmers wrote when they were at NCSA."
- leobg 4y ago
  Cool. Sounds like a recipe for an Internet that doesn’t need a Google. Just have a community browser that does what you described. Only that the index isn’t stored locally only, but also shared across users.
KingOfCoders 4y ago
Around 1991 we shared text lists of IPs of FTP servers. Nameservers hadn't arrived in Germany.
papito 4y ago
The "back links" and curated directories (Yahoo) worked just fine in the early internet. It made discovery actually a lot of fun. There was magic to it that is long gone.

36 points by dbrereton 4y ago

> But in the early 90’s, nothing like this existed on the web. The concept, however, was not unheard of. Archie was a system that used crawling to help users find FTP files, and is commonly known as the Internet’s first search engine. There's also Veronica - a play on the Archie comic strip - which crawled gopherspace. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veronica_(search_engine) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veronica_(search_engine) But I actually came here to mention a different sort of search that existed around 1994 or so. Someone had a modified version of Mosaic which would crawl and search all documents which were one or two links away from the current URL. That is, if you are on, say, https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/how-we-searched-before-search/ https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/how-we-searched-before-search... and did a search for "Veronica" then it would look search that page, and then find and follow all of the links in the page and search them. And even repeat for another link. This would help if you remembered that you found X connected to Y, and while you can remember X you don't quite remember where Y was. > At the time, NCSA was best known for Mosaic, later Netscape Navigator, later Mozilla Firefox. Their own link says that "Netscape’s browser was a complete rewrite of Mosaic. ... The newly formed company didn’t have a right to any of the code that their programmers wrote when they were at NCSA."

leobg 4y ago
Cool. Sounds like a recipe for an Internet that doesn’t need a Google. Just have a community browser that does what you described. Only that the index isn’t stored locally only, but also shared across users.

KingOfCoders 4y ago

Around 1991 we shared text lists of IPs of FTP servers. Nameservers hadn't arrived in Germany.

papito 4y ago

The "back links" and curated directories (Yahoo) worked just fine in the early internet. It made discovery actually a lot of fun. There was magic to it that is long gone.