Digital Vernacular Music-Culture: Search Engines

* definition
- A Web search engine is a tool designed to search for information on
the World Wide Web. Information may consist of web pages, images,
information and other types of files. Some search engines also mine
data available in newsbooks, databases, or open directories. Unlike
Web directories, which are maintained by human editors, search engines
operate algorithmically or are a mixture of algorithmic and human
input.

* origin: when, where, what

Netscape - 1996, US, a search engine rotated with these five engines:
Yahoo!, Magellan, Lycos, Infoseek and Excite.

Yahoo! - late 1990s, US, started as a web directory of other websites,
organized in a hierarchy, as opposed to a searchable index of pages
and later turned into a full-fledged portal with a search interface.

Google - 1997, US, a web search engine.

Gopher - 1991, University of Minnesota, a distributed document search
and retrieval network protocol designed for the Internet.

* main figures: who are they? what do they do?

Netscape - Jim Clark, founder, is also father-in-law of youtube co
founder, Chad Hurley. He was a computer scientist and became a super
entrepreneur.

Yahoo! - Jerry Yang and David Filo. They were electrical engineers
from Standford.

Google - Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Graduates from Stanford who
became entrepreneurs.

Gopher - Mark McCahill - "gopher was a big deal b/c it was easy to
install. a lot of people can run it and the more people who install
the software the more information is available on the servers.
ordinary people could and should have exceptional power at their finer
tips.", Farhad Anklesaria, Paul Lindner, Dan Torrey, and Bob Alberti.
They were members of the University of Minnesota.

references/related links

history/information on gopher –

http://www.codeghost.com/gopher_history.html