JumpStation was the first WWW search engine that behaved, and appeared to the user, the way current web search engines do.Why we nearly McGoogled it Metro, 15 March 2009 It started indexing on 12 December 1993Archive of email sent to Matt Gray and was announced on the Mosaic "What's New" webpage on 21 December 1993.Archive of NCSA's What's New, December 1993 It was hosted at the University of Stirling in Scotland.
It was written by Jonathon Fletcher, from Scarborough, England,The Web Robots Pages: JumpStationRobots, Spiders and Wanderers: Finding Information on the Web archived 28 March 2009 from the original who graduated from the university with a first class honours degree in Computing Science in the summer of 1992Googling was born in Stirling The Scotsman, 15 March 2009 and has subsequently been called the "father of the search engine".
He was later employed at the university as a systems administrator. JumpStation's development was discontinued when he left in late 1994, having failed to persuade investors, including the university, to provide financial backing. At this point the database had 275,000 entries spanning 1,500 servers.Matrix, Search Engines: JumpStation archived 28 March 2009 from the original
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.SearchEngineHistory.com 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,Oliver A. McBryan: GENVL and WWWW: Tools for Taming the Web, Oscar Nierstrasz (Ed.), Proceedings of the First International World Wide Web Conference, Geneva, Switzerland, May 1994 (Ref 9). and presented its results in the form of a list of URLs that matched those keywords.
The story of JumpStation's origin and development was written up, using interviews with Fletcher, by Wishart and Bochsler in 2003.Adam Wishart and Regula Bochsler: Leaving Reality Behind: etoys v eToys.com, and other battles to control cyberspace, Ecco, 2003, .
Nominations JumpStation was nominated for a "Best Of The Web" award in 1994.Best of the Web '94: Best Navigational Aid Best of the Web
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