Loading ...« Weekly Wrap Up - Industry News, 30 May 2008 | Home | SMX Advanced Seattle Recap »
The History of Search
By David Sumner-Smith | June 3, 2008
Fast searches. How does that work anyway? I can search for books in Seattle on OpenList and return 281 businesses in 1.5 seconds. I can search commuter bike on Yahoo! Shopping and get 364 results nationwide in .25 seconds. That is nutso! How do they do that?
I mean just think if Ulysses had had the Internet back in days of yore. We wouldn’t have The Odyssey. No sirens, no lotus eaters, no ears filled with wax, no lashing to the mast to resist temptation. He would have just googled his dad’s name, maybe traced his credit card charges, vectored in a couple map searches – and voila. But we wouldn’t have that Cream song with the ridiculous lyrics and the great intro, “Tales of Brave Ulysses”! And, perhaps worst of all, we wouldn’t have the movie, Oh Brother Where Art Thou. (Just go with me.)
I know it’s a bit of an emperor’s new clothes thing in the tech world. Global searches at the speed of light are a bland obvious truth. But hey, I’m an English major! I’m amazed!
So having bared my ignorance publicly, here’s what I’ve gleaned about the history and how of speedy searches.
I found a great site, www.searchenginehistory.com, I recommend it to you with GUSTO! It’s a veritable cornucopia of search-related history, links, definitions, and company information.
On this site I learned about (on my own time I might add):
The three main parts of a search engine
The concept of hypertext (1945)
Gerald Salton – the father of modern search technology (after whom the Salton Sea is NOT named)
File Transfer Protocol as the precursor to the Web
Ted Nelson – coiner of the term “hypertext” … “There is still conflict surrounding the exact reasons why Project Xanadu failed to take off….” (I’m guessing branding issues.)
Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, ARPANet, the network which eventually led to the internet.
It’s amazing how young the technology is. The first bot was created in June of ’93, when there were “a few hundred web sites.”
The first search engine, Archie, was created in 1990.
And, as I said, the site has excellent links to more information. Just a real find!
So speed is good. Maps are good. Speedy maps are good. Local details are good. Local commercial searches are zee best and they lower your carbon footprint, but we’ll probably never get any classic literature out of them. When was the last time you met somebody named Ulysses?
Topics: Maps, Web site, Local Search, Uncategorized |