On September 2, 1993, Oscar Nierstrasz at the University of Geneva launched W3Catalog, widely considered the first search engine for the World Wide Web. This was still the web’s very early days, barely two years after Tim Berners-Lee had put the first website online, and there was no Google, no Yahoo, not even a way to search the growing pile of pages beyond browsing hand-curated lists.
W3Catalog’s approach was clever rather than technically heroic: instead of crawling the web itself (a technique that didn’t really exist yet), it took several already-popular, manually maintained directories of web resources, mirrored them, and reformatted their entries into one searchable database. A Perl-based front end, built as an extension to an early web server since CGI scripting didn’t exist yet either, let visitors actually query that combined list. It wasn’t glamorous, but it worked, and it proved that “searching the web” could be a standalone service rather than something users did by clicking through bookmark pages. W3Catalog stayed online until 1996, by which point crawler-based engines like WebCrawler and Lycos had made its approach obsolete.
Also on this day: September 2, 1969 marked the very first ARPANET equipment installation at UCLA, the network that would eventually grow into the internet W3Catalog was built to search.
Source: Wikipedia, The History of the Web
Daily Tech History is a running series looking back at notable moments in technology on this date.
