Surf Wiki
Save to docs
general/defunct-internet-search-engines

From Surf Wiki (app.surf) — the open knowledge base

W3Catalog

Retired early Internet search engine created in 1993

Summary

Retired early Internet search engine created in 1993

W3 Catalog was an early web search engine, first released on September 2, 1993 by developer Oscar Nierstrasz at the University of Geneva.

The engine was initially given the name jughead, but then later renamed.Oscar Nierstrasz (November 8, 1996) http://scg.unibe.ch/archive/software/w3catalog/W3CatalogHistory.html, Software Composition Group, Universität Bern accessed and retrieved April 18th, 2019 Unlike later search engines, like Aliweb, which attempt to index the web by crawling over the accessible content of web sites, W3 Catalog exploited the fact that many high-quality, manually maintained lists of web resources were already available. W3 Catalog simply mirrored these pages, reformatted the contents into individual entries, and provided a Perl-based front-end to enable dynamic querying.

At the time, CGI did not yet exist, so W3 Catalog was implemented as an extension to Tony Sander's Plexus web server, implemented in Perl.

W3 Catalog was retired on November 8, 1996.

In February 2010, the domain name w3catalog.com was acquired, and like the original index, each new website entry was manually reviewed before being added. The site was dormant again by 2023.

Notes

References

  1. [[Oscar Nierstrasz]]. (2 September 1993). "Searchable Catalog of WWW Resources (experimental)".
  2. "W3 Catalog History".
  3. Thomas R. Gruber, Sunil Vemuri and James Rice. (December 1995). "Virtual documents that explain How Things Work: Dynamically generated question-answering documents". Knowledge Systems Laboratory, Stanford University.
  4. (2010-04-24). "Computers & Internet Web Directory - W3Catalog.com".
  5. https://www.w3catalog.com/ accessed 25th of October 2019
Wikipedia Source

This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page.

defunct-internet-search-engines internet-properties-disestablished-in-1996 internet-properties-established-in-1993
Want to explore this topic further?

Ask Mako anything about W3Catalog — get instant answers, deeper analysis, and related topics.

Research with Mako

Free with your Surf account

Content sourced from Wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.

This content may have been generated or modified by AI. CloudSurf Software LLC is not responsible for the accuracy, completeness, or reliability of AI-generated content. Always verify important information from primary sources.

Report