ALIWEB

Introduction and Development of ALIWEB - ALIWEB is considered the first Web search engine - First announced in November 1993 by developer Martijn Koster - Presented in May 1994 at the First International Conference on the World Wide Web at CERN in Geneva - Preceded WebCrawler by several months - Allowed users to submit the locations of index files on their sites Features and Functionality of ALIWEB - Enabled the search engine to include webpages - Added user-written page descriptions and keywords - Empowered webmasters to define terms leading users to their pages - Avoided setting bots that used up bandwidth - Relatively few people submitted their sites, resulting in limited usage Background and Objectives of ALIWEB - Martijn Koster detailed the background and objectives of ALIWEB in a paper presented at CERN - Martijn Koster was also instrumental in the creation of the Robots Exclusion Standard - ALIWEB's functions and framework were outlined in the paper - Martijn Koster is not associated with a commercial website posing as ALIWEB - He warned against using the advertising site claiming to have trademarked ALIWEB Related Concepts - World Wide Web Worm - JumpStation - History of the Internet - List of search engines References - Martijn Koster's announcement of ALIWEB in comp.infosystems - List of PostScript files for the WWW94 advance proceedings - Chris Sherman's article on ALIWEB in Search Engine Watch - Wes Sonnenreich's book 'A History of Search Engines' on John Wiley & Sons website - Martijn Koster's papers on Robots Exclusion and historical web services