Tom Evslin

The essay itself is general and surprising, and the combination never loses its effectiveness.

Ideas keep evolving. There was nothing new about the idea of a search engine when Google came into existence in 1998.

In 1945, Dr. Vannevar Bush wrote an article titled As We May Think:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/

> he urges that men of science should then turn to the massive task of making more accessible our bewildering store of knowledge.

In the 1960’s, Gerard Salton created and developed Salton’s Magic Automatic Retriever of Text (SMART). He also authored a book called A Theory of Indexing detailing his initial tests that search is largely based off of relevancy algorithms. Here’s a very interesting blog post titled Search Down Memory Lane by Tom Evslin who worked with Salton during this project:

http://blog.tomevslin.com/2006/01/search_down_mem.html

Fast forward to 1990, a man named Alan Emtage created the first search engine known as Archie which retrieved a database files by matching user queries using regexes. Following the growth of Archie’s popularity, two similar search engines Veronica and Jughead were created and they started indexing plain text files.

In 1993, the first bot called World Wide Web Wanderer was created and then it was upgraded to capture active URLs and store them in a database. Then came ALIWEB (Archie-Like Indexing of the Web), which crawled meta information of pages.

There’re others including…

FWIW, Tom Evslin made a similar point:

"So, if you’re just now starting up, don’t get blinded by the successes of the first people to realize a platform could be built and operated on the cheap. You already missed that wave. Now, unless you are extraordinarily lucky or well-connected, you aren’t going to succeed in publicizing your new service and getting up to a critical mass of content or subscribers or both unless you raise or have enough money to create initial awareness or value. There is too much clutter from which you must emerge."

http://blog.tomevslin.com/2007/01/web_20_greater_.html