Nowadays, when we make a query on the Internet, we usually use the Google search engine. There are many alternatives, such as Microsoft’s Bing, as well as other options like DuckDuckGo or Ecosia, among others. But all these search engines are very different from Wandexhe first search engine in the modern sense of the term, developed by an MIT engineer in 1993.
Currently, we could not live without modern search engines. Any problem or question that arises, we usually search for it on the Internet. Search engines, depending on the terms we enter, return us answers that could solve our doubt. Although, currently, you have to go through advertising, AI and other elements that distort the search.
All these browsers have a simple but elegant graphical interface. They serve information well, show us summaries of the content and many other data. But this was not always the case, since the first search engine in history was much simpler and less “elegant”, so to speak.
Wandex, the pioneering search engine
For the “millennial” search engine, it’s Google and nothing else, they probably have no idea who the pioneers were. If you already have gray hair (if you’re lucky enough), you’ll probably know others like the classic AltaVista. But very few people know Wandex, the father of modern search engines.
You should know that Wandex was developed by Matthew GrayAnd MIT scientist In 1993. What’s interesting is that it wasn’t born as a search engine, but as a search engine. size measuring tool of the World Wide Web. But it had an excellent ability to index and search for information on websites, making it a great tool.
The way this search engine works actually differs very little from modern search engines. The user entered a word or keywords relating to a question or information they were looking for. Wandex searched for matches in the titles and metadata of the various indexed pages.
We are talking about a fairly fast process that returns a list of relevant web pages. The organization is not far from current systems, since it ranks them by relevance to the query formulated.
Where the biggest difference from modern search engines is in the interface. At that time, it was a plain text interface with links, nothing more. There were no graphical elements, no layout adjustments, or anything else added later.
This is how Wadex, a system designed to measure the size of the World Wide Web, became the origin of web search engines. More powerful search-oriented solutions soon emerged, such as WebCrawler Or High view.
Wandex is still an indexing system that allows you to search using keywords. This is the modern mechanism of search engines, which did not exist at that time. A simple mechanism that works very well and is the basis of all search engines, although of course, elements have been added over time.
Also say that other systems already existed before to locate information on the Internet. Archie was an FTP file indexer released in 1990 and Gopher offered a hierarchical menu of web resources in 1992, but none offered the capabilities of Wandex.
