JumpStation

JumpStation was the first WWW search engine that behaved, and appeared to the user, the way current web search engines do.^[1] It started indexing on 12 December 1993^[2] and was announced on the Mosaic "What's New" webpage on 21 December 1993.^[3] It was hosted at the University of Stirling in Scotland.

It was written by Jonathon Fletcher, from Scarborough, England,^[4][5] who graduated from the university with a first class honours degree in Computing Science in the summer of 1992^[6] and has subsequently been called the "father of the search engine".^[7]

He was later employed at the university as a systems administrator. JumpStation's development was discontinued when he left in late 1994, having failed to persuade investors, including the university, to provide financial backing.^[6] At this point the database had 275,000 entries spanning 1,500 servers.^[8]

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.^[8][9] 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,^[10] and presented its results in the form of a list of URLs that matched those keywords.

The story of JumpStation's origin and development was written up, using interviews with Fletcher, by Wishart and Bochsler in 2003.^[11]