Jump Station

Type of site	Web search engine
Available in	English
Owner	Jonathon Fletcher
Launched	12 December 1993; 30 years ago (1993-12-12)
Current status	Defunct/Closed 1994

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 named "father of the search engine".^[7]

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.^[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.

Nominations

JumpStation was nominated for a "Best Of The Web" award in 1994^[11] and the story of its origin and development written up, using interviews with Fletcher, by Wishart and Bochsler.^[12]

See also

• Aliweb
• WebCrawler
• World Wide Web Worm
• Excite

References