Early Web Search Engine Announcements
Web Search–History
Early Web Search Engine Announcements
Today is the 6th anniversary of AltaVista announcing the beginning of a public beta for the new search engine. To mark the occasion I’ve located early or first announcements for several search tools. These posts were found via the just completed Google Usenet archive.
Martijn Koster Annouces the Availability of Aliweb (11/30/93)
An Early Mention of JumpStation by Jonathon Fletcher (2/27/94)
First Mention of McBryan’s World Wide Web Worm in the Usenet Archive is this Technical Query (3/14/94)
Brian Pinkerton Announces the Availability of Webcrawler (6/11/94)
Steve Kirsch Announces Free Demos Of the Infoseek Search Engine (7/18/94)
Jerry Yang Alerts a Usenet group to the Yahoo Database (9/21/94)
Carnegie Mellon University Center for Machine Translation Announces Lycos (8/14/94)
UC Berkeley Announces Inktomi (9/26/95)
Introduction of Excite (9/27/95)
AltaVista Public Beta Press Release (12/15/95)
First Mention of Google on USENET (March 30, 1998)
See Also: How Things Can Change Department: Sergey Brin Asks for Help Finding a Low Airfare from SFO-BWI. (August 18, 1994)
A few week’s ago, GMSV reported on Google’s growing fleet of jets.
See Also: Tim Berners-Lee Introduces the World Wide Web (8/6/91)
Web Search–Google
Something New From Google, Searchable Catalogs
Another day and something new from Google, at least it seems that way. So far Google news always seem to good news for the searcher. This time Google introduces a beta of Google Catalogs. Here you can keyword search and view (images) of pages from over 600 catalogs. The catalogs are from many well-known retailers. Google will be more than happy to include your companies catalog. According to the site, “Inclusion in Google Catalog Search is currently free for publishers. There is no obligation and nothing you need to do other than provide Google with copies of your catalogs.” Related services for retailers are fee-based. Content can also be accessed via a directory with catalogs broken down into 11 top-level categories. An advanced interface allows you to limit to a catagory or to a specific catalog. This is one impressive and practical use of search technology.
Thanks to search engine guru Avi Rappaport for alerting us to this new Google beta.
Update: Learn More from Katie Dean’s Wired News Article