JumpStation

» see js.stir.ac.uk as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

I came online in 1998, on a modem that topped out at 33.6k. JumpStation had been dead for four years by then, and the engines I actually learned the web on were AltaVista and, a little later, Google. This is a grave for something that finished before my turn started.

Jonathon Fletcher was from Scarborough in England. He took a first-class computing science degree at the University of Stirling in the summer of 1992 and stayed on as a systems administrator, which in 1993 meant he had a decent machine and time. The crawler started indexing on 12 December 1993, and on 21 December it turned up on the What's New page that Mosaic shipped with, which was how the whole web found out about anything that year.

Other things called search engines came before it. ALIWEB, from a month earlier, worked by asking webmasters to write index files describing their own sites and submit them. The World Wide Web Wanderer counted servers rather than answering questions. JumpStation was the first that went out and read the web without being asked, then let a stranger type words into a form and handed back a list of links.

~ the record ~

~ what made it first ~

The design was thin by any later standard. It indexed document titles and headings only, never the body text, and it searched them with a linear scan and no ranking at all, so results came back in whatever order the index happened to be holding them. Ranking is the entire distance between JumpStation and Google, and it took another five years for anyone to close it.

What it did settle was the shape of the transaction. A robot goes out on its own schedule and reads pages nobody submitted, and a stranger with a text box gets an answer back out of what it found. Every part of that was new in December 1993 and none of it has changed since.

~ what got buried with it ~

By late 1994 the database held 275,000 entries drawn from 1,500 servers, which at the time was a serious fraction of everything that existed. It picked up a Best of the Web nomination that year. Then Fletcher went looking for money to keep it running and found none, including from the University of Stirling, which was hosting the thing that had put its own domain name in front of most of the people using the web.

~ what replaced it ~

The part worth reading twice is what happened immediately afterward. Within two years the same idea, with money behind it, was AltaVista and Lycos, and by 1998 it was Google. Fletcher had built the working version in his spare time in Scotland in 1993 and been told, in effect, that there was nothing there to fund.

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