World Wide Web Worm

Last updated

The World Wide Web Worm (WWWW) was one of the earliest search engines for the World Wide Web (WWW). It was developed in September 1993 by Oliver McBryan at the University of Colorado as a research project. It is claimed by some to be the first search engine, though it was not released until March 1994, by which time a number of other search engines had been made publicly available.

The worm created a database of 300,000 multimedia objects which could be obtained or searched for keywords via the WWW. [1] It indexed about 110,000 webpages as of 1994. [2] In contrast to present-day search engines, the WWWW featured support for Perl regular expressions.

The website, http://www.cs.colorado.edu/home/mcbryan/WWWW.html, is no longer accessible (archive). Circa 1997 Goto.com purchased WWWW's technology. McBryan stated in a 2016 podcast that WWWW was an educational project and he never thought of commercializing it like Excite or Yahoo! did, partly because the University did not have a department that dealt specifically with such computer technology. [3]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">World Wide Web</span> Linked hypertext system on the Internet

The World Wide Web is an information system that enables content sharing over the Internet through user-friendly ways meant to appeal to users beyond IT specialists and hobbyists. It allows documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet according to specific rules of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">NCSA Mosaic</span> Early web browser (1993–1997)

NCSA Mosaic was among the first widely available web browsers, instrumental in popularizing the World Wide Web and the general Internet by integrating multimedia such as text and graphics. Mosaic was the first browser to display images inline with text.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cello (web browser)</span> Web browser

Cello is an early, discontinued graphical web browser for Windows 3.1; it was developed by Thomas R. Bruce of the Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law School. It was released as shareware in 1993. While other browsers ran on various Unix machines, Cello was the first web browser for Microsoft Windows, using the winsock system to access the Internet. In addition to the basic Windows, Cello worked on Windows NT 3.5 and with small modifications on OS/2.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Archie (search engine)</span> FTP search engine

Archie is a tool for indexing FTP archives, allowing users to more easily identify specific files. It is considered the first Internet search engine. The original implementation was written in 1990 by Alan Emtage, then a postgraduate student at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Archie was superseded by other, more sophisticated search engines, including Jughead and Veronica, which were search engines for the Gopher protocol. These were in turn superseded by search engines like Yahoo! in 1995 and Google in 1998. Work on Archie ceased in the late 1990s. A legacy Archie server was maintained for historic purposes in Poland at Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modelling in the University of Warsaw until 2023.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">WorldWideWeb</span> First web browser, later renamed Nexus

WorldWideWeb is the first web browser and web page editor. It was discontinued in 1994. It was the first WYSIWYG HTML editor.

ALIWEB is the first Web search engine.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tim Bray</span> Canadian software developer

Timothy William Bray is a Canadian software developer, environmentalist, political activist and one of the co-authors of the original XML specification. He worked for Amazon Web Services from December 2014 until May 2020 when he quit due to concerns over the terminating of whistleblowers. Previously he has been employed by Google, Sun Microsystems and Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). Bray has also founded or co-founded several start-ups such as Antarctica Systems.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yahoo Native</span> Internet advertising service provided by Yahoo

Yahoo! Native is a native "Pay per click" Internet advertising service provided by Yahoo.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Western Colorado University</span> Public university in Gunnison, Colorado, US

Western Colorado University is a public university in Gunnison, Colorado. It enrolls approximately 3,000 undergraduate and 450 graduate students, with 25 percent coming from out of state.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alan Emtage</span> Bajan computer scientist

Alan Emtage is a Bajan-Canadian computer scientist who conceived and implemented the first version of Archie, a pre-Web Internet search engine for locating material in public FTP archives. It is widely considered the world's first Internet search engine.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Search engine</span> Software system for finding relevant information on the Web

A search engine is a software system that provides hyperlinks to web pages and other relevant information on the Web in response to a user's query. The user inputs a query within a web browser or a mobile app, and the search results are often a list of hyperlinks, accompanied by textual summaries and images. Users also have the option of limiting the search to a specific type of results, such as images, videos, or news.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of the World Wide Web</span>

The World Wide Web is a global information medium that users can access via computers connected to the Internet. The term is often mistakenly used as a synonym for the Internet, but the Web is a service that operates over the Internet, just as email and Usenet do. The history of the Internet and the history of hypertext date back significantly further than that of the World Wide Web.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alan Kotok</span> American computer scientist

Alan Kotok was an American computer scientist known for his work at Digital Equipment Corporation and at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Steven Levy, in his book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, describes Kotok and his classmates at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as the first true hackers.

WWWW may refer to:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jaime Carbonell</span> American computer scientist (1953–2020)

Jaime Guillermo Carbonell was a computer scientist who made seminal contributions to the development of natural language processing tools and technologies. His extensive research in machine translation resulted in the development of several state-of-the-art language translation and artificial intelligence systems. He earned his B.S. degrees in Physics and in Mathematics from MIT in 1975 and did his Ph.D. under Dr. Roger Schank at Yale University in 1979. He joined Carnegie Mellon University as an assistant professor of computer science in 1979 and lived in Pittsburgh from then. He was affiliated with the Language Technologies Institute, Computer Science Department, Machine Learning Department, and Computational Biology Department at Carnegie Mellon.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">JumpStation</span>

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

<span class="mw-page-title-main">First International Conference on the World-Wide Web</span>

The First International Conference on the World-Wide Web was the first-ever conference about the World Wide Web, and the first meeting of what became the International World Wide Web Conference. It was held on May 25 to 27, 1994 in Geneva, Switzerland. The conference had 380 participants, who were accepted out of 800 applicants. It has been referred to as the "Woodstock of the Web".

MetaCrawler is a search engine. It is a registered trademark of InfoSpace and was created by Erik Selberg.

References

  1. This article is based on material taken from World+Wide+Web+Worm at the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing prior to 1 November 2008 and incorporated under the "relicensing" terms of the GFDL, version 1.3 or later.
  2. "The Anatomy of a Search Engine". www7.scu.edu.au. Archived from the original on 2019-07-02. Retrieved 2019-02-06.
  3. McCullough, Brian (November 6, 2016). "Was The World Wide Web Worm the First Web Search Engine?". Internet History Podcast. Retrieved 2019-02-06.

Sources