ALIWEB (Archie Like Indexing for the Web) is the first Web search engine, as its predecessors were either built with different purposes (as it is the case with the World Wide Web Wanderer) or were literally just indexers (as Archie, Gopher, Veronica and Jughead). It was released in October of 1993 and first presented at the First International Conference on the World-Wide Web in Geneva in 1994. ALIWEB allows users to submit the location of an index file on their site called site.idx, which enables the search engine to include their webpages and add a user written page description and keywords. This empowers webmasters, who can define the terms that leads users to their pages and also avoids setting bots (as the Wanderer) which uses bandwidth. Its original developer, Martijn Koster, was also instrumental in the creation of the Robots Exclusion Standard. (Koster, 1994) ^* discusses the background and objectives of ALIWEB, as well as providing an overview of how it functioned and some insight into it's framework.

ALIWEB is currently undergoing a total rewrite of the programing code and is set to relaunch in 2007 as a competitor to Google, MSN, and Yahoo. The current site at ALIWEB has the very last update of the original ALIWEB database. The entire database at the beginning of the web was so small in 1993, that the original program only searched from the beginning until it had the required number of results requested to display. The search program was reprogrammed to search the entire database and then report the best matches through a weighted system with the new development team. The database is no longer updated and is maintained for historical purposes and is largely outdated.

A list of approximately 500 of the most popular sites on the internet is maintained on the ALIWEB homepage called alilinks. Some of these links are also outdated.

A very complete page concerning the terrorist bombings of September 11, 2001 are listed on one of the links along with pictures of the World Trade Center under construction. ALIWEB 9/11 Page

References

Internet search engines