| Jump Station | |
| Type: | Web search engine |
| Language: | English |
| Owner: | Jonathon Fletcher |
| 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.[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.
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]