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82-495: A search engine is a software system that provides hyperlinks to web pages and other relevant information on the Web in response to a user's query . The user inputs a query within a web browser or a mobile app , and the search results are often a list of hyperlinks, accompanied by textual summaries and images. Users also have the option of limiting the search to a specific type of results, such as images, videos, or news. For

164-423: A CD-ROM , can be done on Gopher. A Gopher system consists of a series of hierarchical hyperlinkable menus. The choice of menu items and titles is controlled by the administrator of the server. Similar to a file on a Web server, a file on a Gopher server can be linked to as a menu item from any other Gopher server. Many servers take advantage of this inter-server linking to provide a directory of other servers that

246-474: A "cloud" as specific information in a particular file, and the prominence of the FTP, influenced the technology and the resulting functionality of Gopher. Gopher is designed to function and to appear much like a mountable read-only global network file system (and software, such as gopherfs , is available that can actually mount a Gopher server as a FUSE resource). At a minimum, whatever can be done with data files on

328-665: A +. A Gopher+ server will respond with a status line followed by the content the client requested. An item is marked as supporting Gopher+ in the Gopher directory listing by a tab + after the port (this is the case of some of the items in the example above). Other features of Gopher+ include: These are clients, libraries, and utilities primarily designed to access gopher resources. Clients like web browsers, libraries, and utilities primarily designed to access World Wide Web resources, but which maintain(ed) gopher support. Browsers with no Gopher native support can still access servers using one of

410-424: A Web server, "GET /" was used as a pseudo-selector to emulate an HTTP GET request . John Goerzen created an addition to the Gopher protocol, commonly referred to as " URL links", that allows links to any protocol that supports URLs. For example, to create a link to http://gopher.quux.org/ , the item type is h , the display string is the title of the link, the item selector is "URL:http://gopher.quux.org/", and

492-622: A certain number of pages crawled, amount of data indexed, or time spent on the website, the spider stops crawling and moves on. "[N]o web crawler may actually crawl the entire reachable web. Due to infinite websites, spider traps, spam, and other exigencies of the real web, crawlers instead apply a crawl policy to determine when the crawling of a site should be deemed sufficient. Some websites are crawled exhaustively, while others are crawled only partially". Indexing means associating words and other definable tokens found on web pages to their domain names and HTML -based fields. The associations are made in

574-407: A command line: The protocol is also supported by cURL since 7.21.2-DEV, which was released in 2010. The selector string in the request can optionally be followed by a tab character and a search string. This is used by item type 7. Gopher menu items are defined by lines of tab-separated values in a text file . This file is sometimes called a gophermap . As the source code to a gopher menu,

656-522: A crucial component of search engines through algorithms such as Hyper Search and PageRank . The first internet search engines predate the debut of the Web in December 1990: WHOIS user search dates back to 1982, and the Knowbot Information Service multi-network user search was first implemented in 1989. The first well documented search engine that searched content files, namely FTP files,

738-816: A disagreement with the government over censorship and a cyberattack. But Bing is in top three web search engine with a market share of 14.95%. Baidu is on top with 49.1% market share. Most countries' markets in the European Union are dominated by Google, except for the Czech Republic , where Seznam is a strong competitor. The search engine Qwant is based in Paris , France , where it attracts most of its 50 million monthly registered users from. Although search engines are programmed to rank websites based on some combination of their popularity and relevancy, empirical studies indicate various political, economic, and social biases in

820-437: A gophermap is roughly analogous to an HTML file for a web page . Each tab-separated line (called a selector line ) gives the client software a description of the menu item: what it is, what it is called, and where it leads to. The client displays the menu items in the order that they appear in the gophermap. The first character in a selector line indicates the item type , which tells the client what kind of file or protocol

902-579: A great expanse of information, all at a single desk. He called it a memex . He described the system in an article titled " As We May Think " that was published in The Atlantic Monthly . The memex was intended to give a user the capability to overcome the ever-increasing difficulty of locating information in ever-growing centralized indices of scientific work. Vannevar Bush envisioned libraries of research with connected annotations, which are similar to modern hyperlinks . Link analysis eventually became

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984-478: A keyword search of most Gopher menu titles in the entire Gopher listings. Jughead (Jonzy's Universal Gopher Hierarchy Excavation And Display) was a tool for obtaining menu information from specific Gopher servers. While the name of the search engine " Archie Search Engine " was not a reference to the Archie comic book series, " Veronica " and " Jughead " are characters in the series, thus referencing their predecessor. In

1066-562: A minimalist interface to its search engine. In contrast, many of its competitors embedded a search engine in a web portal . In fact, the Google search engine became so popular that spoof engines emerged such as Mystery Seeker . By 2000, Yahoo! was providing search services based on Inktomi's search engine. Yahoo! acquired Inktomi in 2002, and Overture (which owned AlltheWeb and AltaVista) in 2003. Yahoo! switched to Google's search engine until 2004, when it launched its own search engine based on

1148-405: A page can be useful to the website when the actual page has been lost, but this problem is also considered a mild form of linkrot . Typically when a user enters a query into a search engine it is a few keywords . The index already has the names of the sites containing the keywords, and these are instantly obtained from the index. The real processing load is in generating the web pages that are

1230-496: A period character) on a line by itself. However, not all servers conform to this part of the protocol and the server may close a connection without returning a final full-stop. The main type of reply from the server is a text or binary resource. Alternatively, the resource can be a menu: a form of structured text resource providing references to other resources. Because of the simplicity of the Gopher protocol, tools such as netcat make it possible to download Gopher content easily from

1312-463: A platform for the first large-scale electronic library connections. The Gopher protocol is still in use by enthusiasts, and although it has been almost entirely supplanted by the Web, a small population of actively-maintained servers remains. The Gopher system was released in mid-1991 by Mark P. McCahill, Farhad Anklesaria, Paul Lindner, Daniel Torrey, and Bob Alberti of the University of Minnesota in

1394-407: A public database, made available for web search queries. A query from a user can be a single word, multiple words or a sentence. The index helps find information relating to the query as quickly as possible. Some of the techniques for indexing, and caching are trade secrets, whereas web crawling is a straightforward process of visiting all sites on a systematic basis. Between visits by the spider ,

1476-475: A search engine to discover it, and to have a web site's record updated after a substantial redesign. Some search engine submission software not only submits websites to multiple search engines, but also adds links to websites from their own pages. This could appear helpful in increasing a website's ranking , because external links are one of the most important factors determining a website's ranking. However, John Mueller of Google has stated that this "can lead to

1558-462: A search function was added, allowing users to search Yahoo! Directory. It became one of the most popular ways for people to find web pages of interest, but its search function operated on its web directory, rather than its full-text copies of web pages. Soon after, a number of search engines appeared and vied for popularity. These included Magellan , Excite , Infoseek , Inktomi , Northern Light , and AltaVista . Information seekers could also browse

1640-473: A search provider, its engine is part of a distributed computing system that can encompass many data centers throughout the world. The speed and accuracy of an engine's response to a query is based on a complex system of indexing that is continuously updated by automated web crawlers . This can include data mining the files and databases stored on web servers , but some content is not accessible to crawlers. There have been many search engines since

1722-513: A searchable database of file names; however, Archie Search Engine did not index the contents of these sites since the amount of data was so limited it could be readily searched manually. The rise of Gopher (created in 1991 by Mark McCahill at the University of Minnesota ) led to two new search programs, Veronica and Jughead . Like Archie, they searched the file names and titles stored in Gopher index systems. Veronica (Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index to Computerized Archives) provided

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1804-415: A string followed by a carriage return followed by a line feed (a "CR + LF" sequence). This is the selector, which identifies the document to be retrieved. If the item selector were an empty line, the default directory would be selected. The server then replies with the requested item and closes the connection. According to the protocol, before the connection closes, the server should send a full-stop (i.e.,

1886-865: A system that has had a lasting influence, reflected in contributions to concepts, in commercial acceptance, or both" . It has been awarded by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) since 1983, with a cash prize sponsored by IBM . Major categories of software systems include those based on application software development , programming software , and system software although the distinction can sometimes be difficult. Examples of software systems include operating systems , computer reservations systems , air traffic control systems, military command and control systems, telecommunication networks , content management systems , database management systems , expert systems , embedded systems , etc. Gopher (protocol) Early research and development: Merging

1968-432: A time when there were still many equally competing computer architectures and operating systems. As a result, there are several Gopher clients available for Acorn RISC OS , AmigaOS , Atari MiNT , Conversational Monitor System (CMS), DOS , classic Mac OS , MVS , NeXT , OS/2 Warp , most Unix-like operating systems, VMS , Windows 3.x , and Windows 9x . GopherVR was a client designed for 3D visualization, and there

2050-401: A tremendous number of unnatural links for your site" with a negative impact on site ranking. In comparison to search engines, a social bookmarking system has several advantages over traditional automated resource location and classification software, such as search engine spiders . All tag-based classification of Internet resources (such as web sites) is done by human beings, who understand

2132-482: Is a system that generates an " inverted index " by analyzing texts it locates. This first form relies much more heavily on the computer itself to do the bulk of the work. Most Web search engines are commercial ventures supported by advertising revenue and thus some of them allow advertisers to have their listings ranked higher in search results for a fee. Search engines that do not accept money for their search results make money by running search related ads alongside

2214-485: Is also related to the field of software architecture . Software systems are an active area of research for groups interested in software engineering in particular and systems engineering in general. Academic journals like the Journal of Systems and Software (published by Elsevier ) are dedicated to the subject. The ACM Software System Award is an annual award that honors people or an organization "for developing

2296-574: Is by far the world's most used search engine, with a market share of 90.6%, and the world's other most used search engines were Bing , Yahoo! , Baidu , Yandex , and DuckDuckGo . In 2024, Google's dominance was ruled an illegal monopoly in a case brought by the US Department of Justice. In Russia, Yandex has a market share of 62.6%, compared to Google's 28.3%. And Yandex is the second most used search engine on smartphones in Asia and Europe. In China, Baidu

2378-473: Is illegal. Biases can also be a result of social processes, as search engine algorithms are frequently designed to exclude non-normative viewpoints in favor of more "popular" results. Indexing algorithms of major search engines skew towards coverage of U.S.-based sites, rather than websites from non-U.S. countries. Google Bombing is one example of an attempt to manipulate search results for political, social or commercial reasons. Several scholars have studied

2460-521: Is little evidence for the filter bubble. On the contrary, a number of studies trying to verify the existence of filter bubbles have found only minor levels of personalisation in search, that most people encounter a range of views when browsing online, and that Google news tends to promote mainstream established news outlets. The global growth of the Internet and electronic media in the Arab and Muslim world during

2542-538: Is menu-driven, and presented an alternative to the World Wide Web in its early stages , but ultimately fell into disfavor, yielding to Hypertext Transfer Protocol ( HTTP ). The Gopher ecosystem is often regarded as the effective predecessor of the World Wide Web. The Gopher protocol was invented by a team led by Mark P. McCahill at the University of Minnesota . It offers some features not natively supported by

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2624-709: Is that search engines and social media platforms use algorithms to selectively guess what information a user would like to see, based on information about the user (such as location, past click behaviour and search history). As a result, websites tend to show only information that agrees with the user's past viewpoint. According to Eli Pariser users get less exposure to conflicting viewpoints and are isolated intellectually in their own informational bubble. Since this problem has been identified, competing search engines have emerged that seek to avoid this problem by not tracking or "bubbling" users, such as DuckDuckGo . However many scholars have questioned Pariser's view, finding that there

2706-527: Is the most popular search engine. South Korea's homegrown search portal, Naver , is used for 62.8% of online searches in the country. Yahoo! Japan and Yahoo! Taiwan are the most popular avenues for Internet searches in Japan and Taiwan, respectively. China is one of few countries where Google is not in the top three web search engines for market share. Google was previously a top search engine in China, but withdrew after

2788-609: The Baidu search engine, which was founded by him in China and launched in 2000. In 1996, Netscape was looking to give a single search engine an exclusive deal as the featured search engine on Netscape's web browser. There was so much interest that instead, Netscape struck deals with five of the major search engines: for $ 5 million a year, each search engine would be in rotation on the Netscape search engine page. The five engines were Yahoo!, Magellan, Lycos, Infoseek, and Excite. Google adopted

2870-410: The cached version of the page (some or all the content needed to render it) stored in the search engine working memory is quickly sent to an inquirer. If a visit is overdue, the search engine can just act as a web proxy instead. In this case, the page may differ from the search terms indexed. The cached page holds the appearance of the version whose words were previously indexed, so a cached version of

2952-405: The Internet without assistance. They can either submit one web page at a time, or they can submit the entire site using a sitemap , but it is normally only necessary to submit the home page of a web site as search engines are able to crawl a well designed website. There are two remaining reasons to submit a web site or web page to a search engine: to add an entirely new web site without waiting for

3034-500: The Jewish version of Google, and Christian search engine SeekFind.org. SeekFind filters sites that attack or degrade their faith. Web search engine submission is a process in which a webmaster submits a website directly to a search engine. While search engine submission is sometimes presented as a way to promote a website, it generally is not necessary because the major search engines use web crawlers that will eventually find most web sites on

3116-508: The United States. Its central goals were, as stated in RFC   1436 : Gopher combines document hierarchies with collections of services, including WAIS , the Archie and Veronica search engines , and gateways to other information systems such as File Transfer Protocol (FTP) and Usenet . The general interest in campus-wide information systems (CWISs) in higher education at the time, and

3198-568: The Unix world standard of assigning programs and files short, cryptic names such as grep, cat, troff, sed, awk, perl, and so on. Software system A software system differs from a computer program or software. While a computer program is generally a set of instructions ( source , or object code ) that perform a specific task, a software system is more or an encompassing concept with many more components such as specification, test results , end-user documentation, maintenance records, etc. The use of

3280-480: The Web and imposes a much stronger hierarchy on the documents it stores. Its text menu interface is well-suited to computing environments that rely heavily on remote text-oriented computer terminals , which were still common at the time of its creation in 1991 , and the simplicity of its protocol facilitated a wide variety of client implementations. More recent Gopher revisions and graphical clients added support for multimedia. Gopher's hierarchical structure provided

3362-571: The available Gopher to HTTP gateways or proxy server that converts Gopher menus into HTML ; known proxies are the Floodgap Public Gopher proxy and Gopher Proxy. Similarly, certain server packages such as GN and PyGopherd have built-in Gopher to HTTP interfaces. Squid Proxy software gateways any gopher:// URL to HTTP content, enabling any browser or web agent to access gopher content easily. For Mozilla Firefox and SeaMonkey , Overbite extensions extend Gopher browsing and support

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3444-455: The client should expect. Item type 3 is an error code for exception handling . Gopher client authors improvised item types h (HTML), i (informational message), and s ( sound file ) after the publication of RFC 1436. Browsers like Netscape Navigator and early versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer would prepend the item type code to the selector as described in RFC   4266 , so that

3526-499: The collections from Google and Bing (and others). While lack of investment and slow pace in technologies in the Muslim world has hindered progress and thwarted success of an Islamic search engine, targeting as the main consumers Islamic adherents, projects like Muxlim (a Muslim lifestyle site) received millions of dollars from investors like Rite Internet Ventures, and it also faltered. Other religion-oriented search engines are Jewogle,

3608-487: The combined technologies of its acquisitions. Microsoft first launched MSN Search in the fall of 1998 using search results from Inktomi. In early 1999, the site began to display listings from Looksmart , blended with results from Inktomi. For a short time in 1999, MSN Search used results from AltaVista instead. In 2004, Microsoft began a transition to its own search technology, powered by its own web crawler (called msnbot ). Microsoft's rebranded search engine, Bing ,

3690-453: The content of the resource, as opposed to software, which algorithmically attempts to determine the meaning and quality of a resource. Also, people can find and bookmark web pages that have not yet been noticed or indexed by web spiders. Additionally, a social bookmarking system can rank a resource based on how many times it has been bookmarked by users, which may be a more useful metric for end-users than systems that rank resources based on

3772-502: The cultural changes triggered by search engines, and the representation of certain controversial topics in their results, such as terrorism in Ireland , climate change denial , and conspiracy theories . There has been concern raised that search engines such as Google and Bing provide customized results based on the user's activity history, leading to what has been termed echo chambers or filter bubbles by Eli Pariser in 2011. The argument

3854-415: The current versions of the browsers (Firefox Quantum v ≥57 and equivalent versions of SeaMonkey): OverbiteWX includes support for accessing Gopher servers not on port 70 using a whitelist and for CSO/ph queries . OverbiteFF always uses port 70. For Chromium and Google Chrome , Burrow is available. It redirects gopher:// URLs to a proxy. In the past an Overbite proxy-based extension for these browsers

3936-410: The dawn of the Web in the 1990s, but Google Search became the dominant one in the 2000s and has remained so. It currently has a 91% global market share. The business of websites improving their visibility in search results , known as marketing and optimization , has thus largely focused on Google. In 1945, Vannevar Bush described an information retrieval system that would allow a user to access

4018-554: The desired date range. It is also possible to weight by date because each page has a modification time. Most search engines support the use of the Boolean operators AND, OR and NOT to help end users refine the search query . Boolean operators are for literal searches that allow the user to refine and extend the terms of the search. The engine looks for the words or phrases exactly as entered. Some search engines provide an advanced feature called proximity search , which allows users to define

4100-614: The directory instead of doing a keyword-based search. In 1996, Robin Li developed the RankDex site-scoring algorithm for search engines results page ranking and received a US patent for the technology. It was the first search engine that used hyperlinks to measure the quality of websites it was indexing, predating the very similar algorithm patent filed by Google two years later in 1998. Larry Page referenced Li's work in some of his U.S. patents for PageRank. Li later used his Rankdex technology for

4182-479: The distance between keywords. There is also concept-based searching where the research involves using statistical analysis on pages containing the words or phrases you search for. The usefulness of a search engine depends on the relevance of the result set it gives back. While there may be millions of web pages that include a particular word or phrase, some pages may be more relevant, popular, or authoritative than others. Most search engines employ methods to rank

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4264-408: The domain and port are that of the originating Gopher server (so that clients that do not support URL links will query the server and receive an HTML redirection page). Gopher+ is a forward compatible enhancement to the Gopher protocol. Gopher+ works by sending metadata between the client and the server. The enhancement was never widely adopted by Gopher servers. The client sends a tab followed by

4346-404: The ease of setup of Gopher servers to create an instant CWIS with links to other sites' online directories and resources, were the factors contributing to Gopher's rapid adoption. The name was coined by Anklesaria as a play on several meanings of the word "gopher". The University of Minnesota mascot is the gopher , a gofer is an assistant who "goes for" things, and a gopher burrows through

4428-437: The existence at each site of an index file in a particular format. JumpStation (created in December 1993 by Jonathon Fletcher ) used a web robot to find web pages and to build its index, and used a web form as the interface to its query program. It was thus the first WWW resource-discovery tool to combine the three essential features of a web search engine (crawling, indexing, and searching) as described below. Because of

4510-532: The ground to reach a desired location. The World Wide Web was in its infancy in 1991, and Gopher services quickly became established. By the late 1990s, Gopher had ceased expanding. Several factors contributed to Gopher's stagnation: Gopher remains in active use by its enthusiasts, and there have been attempts to revive Gopher on modern platforms and mobile devices. One attempt is The Overbite Project, which hosts various browser extensions and modern clients. The conceptualization of knowledge in "Gopher space" or

4592-400: The idea of selling search terms in 1998 from a small search engine company named goto.com . This move had a significant effect on the search engine business, which went from struggling to one of the most profitable businesses in the Internet. Search engines were also known as some of the brightest stars in the Internet investing frenzy that occurred in the late 1990s. Several companies entered

4674-520: The information they provide and the underlying assumptions about the technology. These biases can be a direct result of economic and commercial processes (e.g., companies that advertise with a search engine can become also more popular in its organic search results), and political processes (e.g., the removal of search results to comply with local laws). For example, Google will not surface certain neo-Nazi websites in France and Germany, where Holocaust denial

4756-654: The last decade has encouraged Islamic adherents in the Middle East and Asian sub-continent , to attempt their own search engines, their own filtered search portals that would enable users to perform safe searches . More than usual safe search filters, these Islamic web portals categorizing websites into being either " halal " or " haram ", based on interpretation of Sharia law . ImHalal came online in September 2011. Halalgoogling came online in July 2013. These use haram filters on

4838-435: The limited resources available on the platform it ran on, its indexing and hence searching were limited to the titles and headings found in the web pages the crawler encountered. One of the first "all text" crawler-based search engines was WebCrawler , which came out in 1994. Unlike its predecessors, it allowed users to search for any word in any web page , which has become the standard for all major search engines since. It

4920-536: The market spectacularly, receiving record gains during their initial public offerings . Some have taken down their public search engine and are marketing enterprise-only editions, such as Northern Light. Many search engine companies were caught up in the dot-com bubble , a speculation-driven market boom that peaked in March 2000. Around 2000, Google's search engine rose to prominence. The company achieved better results for many searches with an algorithm called PageRank , as

5002-433: The menu item points to. This helps the client decide what to do with it. Gopher's item types are a more basic precursor to the media type system used by the Web and email attachments . The item type is followed by the user display string (a description or label that represents the item in the menu); the selector (a path or other string for the resource on the server); the hostname (the domain name or IP address of

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5084-536: The networks and creating the Internet: Commercialization, privatization, broader access leads to the modern Internet: Examples of Internet services: The Gopher protocol ( / ˈ ɡ oʊ f ər / ) is a communication protocol designed for distributing, searching, and retrieving documents in Internet Protocol networks. The design of the Gopher protocol and user interface

5166-467: The number of external links pointing to it. However, both types of ranking are vulnerable to fraud, (see Gaming the system ), and both need technical countermeasures to try to deal with this. The first web search engine was Archie , created in 1990 by Alan Emtage , a student at McGill University in Montreal. The author originally wanted to call the program "archives", but had to shorten it to comply with

5248-398: The regular search engine results. The search engines make money every time someone clicks on one of these ads. Local search is the process that optimizes the efforts of local businesses. They focus on change to make sure all searches are consistent. It is important because many people determine where they plan to go and what to buy based on their searches. As of January 2022, Google

5330-464: The results to provide the "best" results first. How a search engine decides which pages are the best matches, and what order the results should be shown in, varies widely from one engine to another. The methods also change over time as Internet usage changes and new techniques evolve. There are two main types of search engine that have evolved: one is a system of predefined and hierarchically ordered keywords that humans have programmed extensively. The other

5412-541: The search results list: Every page in the entire list must be weighted according to information in the indexes. Then the top search result item requires the lookup, reconstruction, and markup of the snippets showing the context of the keywords matched. These are only part of the processing each search results web page requires, and further pages (next to the top) require more of this post-processing. Beyond simple keyword lookups, search engines offer their own GUI - or command-driven operators and search parameters to refine

5494-428: The search results. These provide the necessary controls for the user engaged in the feedback loop users create by filtering and weighting while refining the search results, given the initial pages of the first search results. For example, from 2007 the Google.com search engine has allowed one to filter by date by clicking "Show search tools" in the leftmost column of the initial search results page, and then selecting

5576-409: The server), and the network port . All lines in a gopher menu are terminated by "CR + LF". Example of a selector line in a menu source: The following selector line generates a link to the "/home" directory at the subdomain gopher.floodgap.com, on port 70. The item type of 1 indicates that the linked resource is a Gopher menu itself. The string "Floodgap Home" is what the client will show to

5658-503: The standard filename robots.txt , addressed to it. The robots.txt file contains directives for search spiders, telling it which pages to crawl and which pages not to crawl. After checking for robots.txt and either finding it or not, the spider sends certain information back to be indexed depending on many factors, such as the titles, page content, JavaScript , Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), headings, or its metadata in HTML meta tags . After

5740-451: The summer of 1993, no search engine existed for the web, though numerous specialized catalogs were maintained by hand. Oscar Nierstrasz at the University of Geneva wrote a series of Perl scripts that periodically mirrored these pages and rewrote them into a standard format. This formed the basis for W3Catalog , the web's first primitive search engine, released on September 2, 1993. In June 1993, Matthew Gray, then at MIT , produced what

5822-436: The term software system is at times related to the application of systems theory approaches in the context of software engineering . A software system consists of several separate computer programs and associated configuration files , documentation , etc., that operate together. The concept is used in the study of large and complex software, because it focuses on the major components of software and their interactions . It

5904-521: The title "What's New!". The first tool used for searching content (as opposed to users) on the Internet was Archie . The name stands for "archive" without the "v". It was created by Alan Emtage , computer science student at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec , Canada. The program downloaded the directory listings of all the files located on public anonymous FTP ( File Transfer Protocol ) sites, creating

5986-438: The type of the gopher item could be determined by the url itself. Most gopher browsers still available, use these prefixes in their urls. Here is an example gopher session where the user requires a gopher menu ( /Reference on the first line): The gopher menu sent back from the server, is a sequence of lines each of which describes an item that can be retrieved. Most clients will display these as hypertext links, and so allow

6068-432: The user can access. The Gopher protocol was first described in RFC   1436 . Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) has assigned Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) port 70 to the Gopher protocol. The protocol is simple to negotiate, making it possible to browse without using a client. First, the client establishes a TCP connection with the server on port 70, the standard gopher port. The client then sends

6150-399: The user to navigate through gopherspace by following the links. This menu includes a text resource (itemtype 0 on the third line), multiple links to submenus (itemtype 1 , on the second line as well as lines 4–6) and a non-standard information message (from line 7 on), broken down to multiple lines by providing dummy values for selector, host and port. Historically, to create a link to

6232-448: The user when visiting the example menu. In a Gopher menu's source code, a one-character code indicates what kind of content the client should expect. This code may either be a digit or a letter of the alphabet; letters are case-sensitive . The technical specification for Gopher, RFC   1436 , defines 14 item types. The later gopher+ specification defined an additional 3 types. A one-character code indicates what kind of content

6314-500: Was Archie , which debuted on 10 September 1990. Prior to September 1993, the World Wide Web was entirely indexed by hand. There was a list of webservers edited by Tim Berners-Lee and hosted on the CERN webserver . One snapshot of the list in 1992 remains, but as more and more web servers went online the central list could no longer keep up. On the NCSA site, new servers were announced under

6396-452: Was also the search engine that was widely known by the public. Also, in 1994, Lycos (which started at Carnegie Mellon University ) was launched and became a major commercial endeavor. The first popular search engine on the Web was Yahoo! Search . The first product from Yahoo! , founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo in January 1994, was a Web directory called Yahoo! Directory . In 1995,

6478-408: Was available but is no longer maintained and does not work with the current (>23) releases. For Konqueror , Kio gopher is available. As the bandwidth-sparing simple interface of Gopher can be a good match for mobile phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs), the early 2010s saw a renewed interest in native Gopher clients for popular smartphones . Gopher popularity was at its height at

6560-443: Was explained in the paper Anatomy of a Search Engine written by Sergey Brin and Larry Page , the later founders of Google. This iterative algorithm ranks web pages based on the number and PageRank of other web sites and pages that link there, on the premise that good or desirable pages are linked to more than others. Larry Page's patent for PageRank cites Robin Li 's earlier RankDex patent as an influence. Google also maintained

6642-476: Was launched on June 1, 2009. On July 29, 2009, Yahoo! and Microsoft finalized a deal in which Yahoo! Search would be powered by Microsoft Bing technology. As of 2019, active search engine crawlers include those of Google, Sogou , Baidu, Bing, Gigablast , Mojeek , DuckDuckGo and Yandex . A search engine maintains the following processes in near real time: Web search engines get their information by web crawling from site to site. The "spider" checks for

6724-553: Was probably the first web robot , the Perl -based World Wide Web Wanderer , and used it to generate an index called "Wandex". The purpose of the Wanderer was to measure the size of the World Wide Web, which it did until late 1995. The web's second search engine Aliweb appeared in November 1993. Aliweb did not use a web robot , but instead depended on being notified by website administrators of

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