aug 1, 1990 - SEARCH ENGINE
Description:
Description: A software system that is designed to carry out web search which means to search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a textual web search query.
History: Archie was the first search engine to be recorded, it searched FTP sites to create an index of downloadable files. The Archie service began as a project for students and volunteer staff at the McGill University School of Computer Science in 1987,when Peter Deutsch, Emtage, and Heelan were asked to connect the School of Computer Science to the Internet. The earliest versions of Archie, written by Alan Emtage, simply contacted a list of FTP archives on a regular basis (contacting each roughly once a month, so as not to waste too many resources of the remote servers) and requested a listing. These listings were stored in local files to be searched using the Unix grep command. But due to limited space, only the listings were available and not for the contents for each site.
Special Features: A special feature of search engines lets you save time in two ways: by eliminating the need to find information manually, and by performing searches at high speeds. Without a search engine, you would have to look at sites one by one and pore over the contents of each carefully – a tedious prospect. A search site automatically compares your criteria to billions of Web pages and gives you results in a fraction of a second. You can perform dozens of searches in the course of a few minutes, altering the criteria as you narrow down results.
Uses: A search engine surveys sites and builds a database organized according to their content. When typing a few descriptive words in the search engine's home page, it finds and displays a list of matching sites ranked by relevance.
Interaction/Exposure: Used on a daily for searching various things, ranging from school work to personal agendas.
Added to timeline:
MIL
Date:
