Inventive Genius: Thomson E Thomson

JUMPSTATION was the first search engine on the World Wide Web that behaved, and appeared to the user, the way current web search engines do. It started indexing on Dec 12,1993 and was announced on the Mosaic “What’s New” webpage on Dec 21. Back then, it was hosted at the University of Stirling in Scotland.

The software was written by Jonathon Fletcher, the “father of the search engine”.

He was subsequently employed there as a systems administrator. JumpStation’s development discontinued when he left the University in late 1994, having failed to get any investors, including the University of Stirling, to financially back his idea. At this point the database had 275,000 entries spanning 1,500 servers.

JumpStation used document titles and headings to index the web pages found using a simple linear search, and did not provide any ranking of results.

However, JumpStation had the same basic shape as Google search in that it used an index solely built by a web robot, searched this index using keyword queries entered by the user on a web form whose location was well-known, and presented its results in the form of a list of URLs that matched those keywords.

In 1994, JumpStation was nominated for a “Best Of The Web” award.

What Fletcher invented was the world’s first webcrawling search engine - the very technology that powers Google, Bing, Yahoo and all the major search tools on the web today.

In 1993, the web was in its infancy.

Mosaic, the first popular browser with an interface that resembles the ones we use today, had just been released, and the total amount of web pages numbered in the thousands.

Fletcher was a promising graduate of the University of Stirling, with an offer to study for a PhD at the University of Glasgow.

Before he could take his place, funding at Glasgow was cut, and Fletcher found himself at a loose end.

“I was suddenly very motivated to find a source of income,” he recalls, “so I went back to my university and got a job working for the technology department.” It was in this job that he first encountered the world wide web and Mosaic’s What’s New page. While building a web server for the university, Fletcher realised the What’s New page was fundamentally flawed. Because websites were added to the list manually, there was nothing to track changes to their content. Consequently, many of the links were quickly out-of-date or wrongly labelled.

“If you wanted to see what had changed you had to go back and look,” Fletcher said of Mosaic’s links. “With a degree in computing science and an idea that there had to be a better way, I decided to write something that would go and look for me.”

He put together an index of pages which could then be searched by a web crawler, essentially an automated process that visits, and indexes, every link on every web page it comes across. The process continues until the crawler runs out of things to visit. Ten days later, on On Dec 21 1993, JumpStation ran out of things to visit. It had indexed 25,000 pages. Fletcher quickly built an easy-to-navigate search tool for the index, stuck his website on Mosaic’s What’s New page, and the world’s first modern search engine was in operation.

“I would say that he is the father of the web search engine,” said Prof Mark Sanderson of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, who has studied the history of information retrieval. As JumpStation grew, it required more and more investment - something which the University of Stirling was not willing to provide. “It ran on a shared server,” explains Fletcher. “There wasn’t a lot of disk space and back then disks were small and expensive.” By June of 1994, JumpStation had indexed 275,000 pages. Space constraints forced Fletcher to only index titles and headers of web pages, and not the entire content of the page, but even with this compromise, JumpStation started to struggle under the load. And so did Fletcher. “It wasn’t my job,” he says. “My job was to keep the student labs running and do system administration and technology odd jobs.” A job offer to go and work in Tokyo proved too strong to resist, and the university did little to try and keep him, or JumpStation, from leaving.

“I was obviously not very successful in convincing them of its potential,” said Fletcher. “At the time I did what I thought was right, but there have been moments in the last 20 years where I’ve looked back.”