Aliweb

ALIWEB (Archie Like Indexing for the WEB) can be considered the first Web search engine, as its predecessors were either built with different purposes (the Wanderer, Gopher) or were literally just indexers (Archie, Veronica and Jughead).

First announced in November 1993cite web |url= http://groups.google.com/group/comp.infosystems.www/browse_frm/thread/5903be849c05362f/4b58ee36a52f21ee?hl=en#4b58ee36a52f21ee |title= ANNOUNCEMENT: ALIWEB (Archie-Like Indexing for the WEB) |author= Martijn Koster |format= html |work= comp.infosystems ( [http://groups.google.com/group/comp.infosystems.www/msg/4b58ee36a52f21ee?oe=UTF-8&output=gplain plaintext version] ) |date= 30 November 1993 |quote= ] by developer Martijn Koster, and presented in May 1994cite web |url= http://www94.web.cern.ch/WWW94/PrelimProcs.html |title= List of PostScript files for the WWW94 advance proceedings |format= html |work= First International Conference on the World-Wide Web |date= June 1994 |quote= Title: "Aliweb - Archie-Like Indexing in the Web." Author: Martijn Koster. Institute: NEXOR Ltd., UK. PostScript, Size: 213616, Printed: 10 pages ] at the First International Conference on the World Wide Web at CERN in Geneva, ALIWEB preceded WebCrawler by several months.cite web |url= http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=2161311 |title= Happy Birthday, Aliweb! |author= Chris Sherman |format= html |work= Search Engine Watch |date= 3 December 2002 |quote ]

ALIWEB allowed users to submit the locations of index files on their sitescite web |url= http://www.wiley.com/legacy/compbooks/sonnenreich/history.html |title= A History of Search Engines |author= Wes Sonnenreich |format= html |work= John Wiley & Sons website|date= 1997 |quote= ] which enabled the search engine to include webpages and add user-written page descriptions and keywords. This empowered webmasters to define the terms that would lead users to their pages, and also avoided setting bots ("e.g." the Wanderer) which used up bandwidth. As relatively few people submitted their sites, ALIWEB was not very widely used.

Martijn Koster, who was also instrumental in the creation of the Robots Exclusion Standard,cite web |url= http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/exclusion.html |title= Robots Exclusion |author= Martijn Koster |format= html |work= robotstxt.org |quote= ] cite web |url= http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/threat-or-treat.html |title= Robots in the Web: threat or treat? |author= Martijn Koster |format= html |work= Reprinted with permission from ConneXions, The Interoperability Report, Volume 9, No. 4, April 1995. |quote= ] detailed the background and objectives of ALIWEB with an overview of its functions and framework in the paper he presented at CERN.

Koster is not associated with a commercial website which uses the aliweb name.cite web |url= http://www.greenhills.co.uk/mak/historical.html |title= Historical Web Services: ALIWEB |author= Martijn Koster |format= html |work= Martijn Koster's Historical Web Services page |quote= Note that I have nothing to do with aliweb.com. It appears some marketing company has taken the old aliweb code and data, and are using it as a site for advertising purposes. Their search results are worthless. Their claim to have trademarked "aliweb" I have been unable to confirm in patent searches. My recommendation is that you avoid them. ]

References

ee also

* History of the Internet
* List of search engines