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ALIWEB

Type of site

Search engine

URL

ALIWEB?at the?Wayback Machine?(archived 18 June 1997)
Launched

May?1994; 29?years ago

Current?status

Defunct

ALIWEB?(Archie-Like Indexing for the Web) is considered the first Web?search engine, as its predecessors were either built with different purposes (the Wanderer,?Gopher) or were only indexers (Archie,?Veronica?and?Jughead).

First announced in November 1993[1]?by developer?Martijn Koster?while working at?Nexor, and presented in May 1994[2]?at the?First International Conference?on the?World Wide Web?at?CERN?in?Geneva, ALIWEB preceded?WebCrawler?by several months.[3]

ALIWEB allowed users to submit the locations of index files on their sites[3][4]?which enabled the search engine to include webpages and add user-written page descriptions and keywords. This empowered webmasters to define the terms that would lead users to their pages, and also avoided setting bots (e.g.?the Wanderer,?JumpStation) which used up bandwidth. As relatively few people submitted their sites, ALIWEB was not very widely used.

Martijn Koster, who was also instrumental in the creation of the?Robots Exclusion Standard,[5][6]?detailed the background and objectives of ALIWEB with an overview of its functions and framework in the paper he presented at?CERN.[2]

Koster is not associated with a?commercial?website posing as ALIWEB.[7]

See also

• World Wide Web Worm

• JumpStation

• History of the Internet

• List of search engines

  References

1. ?Martijn Koster (30 November 1993).?"ANNOUNCEMENT: ALIWEB (Archie-Like Indexing for the WEB)".?comp.infosystems).

2. ^?Jump up to:a?b?"List of PostScript files for the WWW94 advance proceedings".?First International Conference on the World-Wide Web. June 1994. Archived from?the original?on 2018-05-08. Retrieved?2007-06-03.?Title: "Aliweb - Archie-Like Indexing in the Web." Author: Martijn Koster. Institute: NEXOR Ltd.,?UK. PostScript, Size: 213616, Printed: 10 pages

3. ^?Jump up to:a?b?Chris Sherman (3 December 2002).?"Happy Birthday, Aliweb!".?Search Engine Watch. Archived from?the original?on 2006-10-17. Retrieved?2007-01-03.

4. ^?Wes Sonnenreich (1997).?"A History of Search Engines".?John Wiley & Sons?website.

5. ^?Martijn Koster.?"Robots Exclusion".?robotstxt.org. Archived from?the original?on 2007-11-07. Retrieved?2007-06-03.

6. ^?Martijn Koster.?"Robots in the Web: threat or treat?".?Reprinted with permission from ConneXions, The Interoperability Report, Volume 9, No. 4, April 1995. Archived from?the original?on 2007-01-02. Retrieved?2007-01-03.

7. ^?Martijn Koster.?"Historical Web Services: ALIWEB".?Martijn Koster's Historical Web Services page. Archived from?the original?on 2007-01-16.?Note that I have nothing to do with aliweb.com. It appears some?marketing?company has taken the old aliweb code and data, and are using it as a site for advertising purposes. Their search results are worthless. Their claim to have trademarked "aliweb" I have been unable to confirm in patent searches. My recommendation is that you avoid them.