ALIWEB
Type of site
Search engine
URLALIWEB at the Wayback Machine (archived 18 June 1997)
LaunchedMay 1994; 29 years ago (1994-05)
Current statusDefunct

ALIWEB (Archie-Like Indexing for the Web) is considered the first Web search engine, as its predecessors were either built with different purposes (the Wanderer, Gopher) or were only indexers (Archie, Veronica and Jughead).

First announced in November 1993[1] by developer Martijn Koster while working at Nexor, and presented in May 1994[2] at the First International Conference on the World Wide Web at CERN in Geneva, ALIWEB preceded WebCrawler by several months.[3]

ALIWEB allowed users to submit the locations of index files on their sites[3][4] which enabled the search engine to include webpages and add user-written page descriptions and keywords. This empowered webmasters to define the terms that would lead users to their pages, and also avoided setting bots (e.g. the Wanderer, JumpStation) which used up bandwidth. As relatively few people submitted their sites, ALIWEB was not very widely used.

Martijn Koster, who was also instrumental in the creation of the Robots Exclusion Standard,[5][6] detailed the background and objectives of ALIWEB with an overview of its functions and framework in the paper he presented at CERN.[2]

Koster is not associated with a commercial website posing as ALIWEB.[7]

See also

References

  1. ^ Martijn Koster (30 November 1993). "ANNOUNCEMENT: ALIWEB (Archie-Like Indexing for the WEB)". comp.infosystems).
  2. ^ a b "List of PostScript files for the WWW94 advance proceedings". First International Conference on the World-Wide Web. June 1994. Archived from the original on 2018-05-08. Retrieved 2007-06-03. Title: "Aliweb - Archie-Like Indexing in the Web." Author: Martijn Koster. Institute: NEXOR Ltd., UK. PostScript, Size: 213616, Printed: 10 pages
  3. ^ a b Chris Sherman (3 December 2002). "Happy Birthday, Aliweb!". Search Engine Watch. Archived from the original on 2006-10-17. Retrieved 2007-01-03.
  4. ^ Wes Sonnenreich (1997). "A History of Search Engines". John Wiley & Sons website.
  5. ^ Martijn Koster. "Robots Exclusion". robotstxt.org. Archived from the original on 2007-11-07. Retrieved 2007-06-03.
  6. ^ Martijn Koster. "Robots in the Web: threat or treat?". Reprinted with permission from ConneXions, The Interoperability Report, Volume 9, No. 4, April 1995. Archived from the original on 2007-01-02. Retrieved 2007-01-03.
  7. ^ Martijn Koster. "Historical Web Services: ALIWEB". Martijn Koster's Historical Web Services page. Archived from the original on 2007-01-16. Note that I have nothing to do with aliweb.com. It appears some marketing company has taken the old aliweb code and data, and are using it as a site for advertising purposes. Their search results are worthless. Their claim to have trademarked "aliweb" I have been unable to confirm in patent searches. My recommendation is that you avoid them.
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