JumpStation

JumpStation was the first WWW search engine that behaved, and appeared to the user, the way current web search engines do.^[1] It started indexing on Sunday 12 December 1993^[2] and was announced on the Mosaic "What's New" webpage on 21 December 1993.^[3] It was hosted at the University of Stirling in Scotland.

It was written by Jonathon Fletcher, from Scarborough, North Yorkshire^[4][5][6] who graduated from the University with a first class honours degree in Computing Science in the summer of 1992^[7] and has subsequently been named "father of the search engine".^[8]

He was subsequently employed there as a systems administrator. JumpStation's development discontinued when he left the University in late 1994, having failed to get any investors, including the University of Stirling, to financially back his idea.^[7] At this point the database had 275,000 entries spanning 1,500 servers.^[9]

JumpStation used document titles and headings to index the web pages found using a simple linear search, and did not provide any ranking of results.^[9][10] However, JumpStation had the same basic shape as Google search in that it used an index solely built by a web robot, searched this index using keyword queries entered by the user on a web form whose location was well-known,^[11] and presented its results in the form of a list of URLs that matched those keywords.

JumpStation was nominated for a "Best Of The Web" award in 1994^[12] and the story of its origin and development written up, using interviews with Fletcher, by Wishart and Bochsler.^[13]

References