Search Engines and AI

byPMindra

2.6K followers

3 months ago

Fleeky recently posted “The Monopoly Reset”

https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/fleeky/blog/the-monopoly-reset

which I found to be a really good read. I thought that I would share some history with the wonderful members here at WA about where it all began.

1989 – The Grandfather of all Search Engines – Archie

“Archie” was the first search engine launched one year after the invention of the world wide web (WWW). This early search engine crawled through an index of downloadable files but was limited to only making listings available and not the content.

Archie was invented by Alan Emtage, a computer science student from Barbados studying at Mcgill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

Archie was a contraction of the word ‘Archives,’ to fit the shortened naming conventions of the UNIX operating system and was designed to provide an online index of public FTP (file transfer protocol) sites.

At its peak, 30 Archie engines crawled the internet and by 1995 had catalogued millions of pages.

While FTP is still a common way to share files over the internet, Archie is no longer used. Archie was dubbed the grandfather of all search engines.

1993 – The Grandmother of Search Engines – Veronica

Veronica stands for Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Netwide Index to Computerized Archives. It has been dubbed as “ the grandmother of all search engines.”

By 1993, the popularity of Archie had grown to a notably large extent and prompted Steven Foster and Fred Barrie at the University of Nevada to develop Veronica to search for “Gopher” files.

Gopher was developed by Mark McCahill and his team at the University of Minnesota and was aptly named after the university mascot, the Golden Gopher.

https://www.gopher.com/

Gopher was a protocol designed to search, distribute and retrieve plain-text documents from Internet Protocol networks. The Gopher ecosystem is often regarded “as the effective predecessor of the World Wide Web.”

The design and user interface was menu-driven and presented an alternative to the WWW in its early stages, but fell into disapproval and conceded to the HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol).

“The Gopher protocol is still in use by enthusiasts, and although it has been almost entirely supplanted by the Web, a small population of actively-maintained servers remains.” –Wikipedia.

Today, Google and other search engines are smarter than ever—they use machine learning to help process and rank information, and can understand natural human speech. But the internet wasn’t always so easy to navigate! There was a time when you had to know the exact wording of a website’s title to find it. Search results were riddled with spam. Getting new content indexed by the search engines could take weeks to complete.

I Gophered "Artificial Intelligence - The Monopoly Reset," and then Googled the same.

The results were interesting.
When you have time, take a break and have some fun.
https://www.gopher.com/

Kindest regards,

@PMindra from Canada.