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. It indexed about 110,000 webpages as of 1994. 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.
References
- 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.
- "The Anatomy of a Search Engine". www7.scu.edu.au. Archived from the original on 2019-07-02. Retrieved 2019-02-06.
- McCullough, Brian (November 6, 2016). "Was The World Wide Web Worm the First Web Search Engine?". Internet History Podcast. Retrieved 2019-02-06.
Sources
- Oliver A. McBryan. GENVL and WWWW: Tools for Taming the Web. Research explained at First International Conference on the World Wide Web. CERN, Geneva (Switzerland), May 25-26-27, 1994. web.Archive.org: ggy www.cs.colorado.edu/home/mcbryan/mypapers/www94.ps (pdf version)
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