Looking for Search

The web was growing quickly in the ‘90s. But all that growth
wasn’t going to lead to much if people couldn’t actually find any
web sites. In 1995, an innovative new tool started crawling the
web. And the search engine it fed opened the doors to the World
Wide Web. 

Elizabeth Van Couvering describes trying to find websites before
search engines, and how difficult it was becoming in the early
’90s to keep track of them all. Louis Monier talks about having
to convince others how important search engines would become—and
he showed them what a web crawler could do. Paul Cormier recounts
taking the search engine from a research project to a commercial
one. And Richard Seltzer wrote the book on search engines,
helping the rest of the world see what a profoundly vital tool
they would become.
 


If you want to read up on some of our research on search, you can
check out all our bonus material over at
redhat.com/commandlineheroes. The page is built in the style of
1995—check it out.

Follow along with the episode transcript.