Launched in November 1993, ALIWEB (Archie Like Indexing for the Web) stands as a trailblazing web search engine. It was the second of its kind to be developed, succeeding JumpStation. The credit for its creation goes to Martijn Koster, a software engineer at Nexor. What set ALIWEB apart was its unique methodology; it gave users the ability to submit index file locations for their websites, thereby enabling webmasters to specify their own search terms. This approach also helped to avoid bandwidth problems triggered by bots. However, despite its groundbreaking features, ALIWEB failed to achieve widespread popularity due to a lack of site submissions. In 1994, Koster showcased ALIWEB at the First International Conference on the World Wide Web and has since made significant contributions to the Robots Exclusion Standard.
ALIWEB (Archie-Like Indexing for the Web) is considered the second Web search engine after JumpStation.
Type of site | Search engine |
|---|---|
| URL | ALIWEB at the Wayback Machine (archived 18 June 1997) |
| Launched | May 1994 |
| Current status | Defunct |
First announced in November 1993 by developer Martijn Koster while working at Nexor, and presented in May 1994 at the First International Conference on the World Wide Web at CERN in Geneva, ALIWEB preceded WebCrawler by several months.
ALIWEB allowed users to submit the locations of index files on their sites which enabled the search engine to include webpages and add user-written page descriptions and keywords. This empowered webmasters to define the terms that would lead users to their pages, and also avoided setting bots (e.g. the Wanderer, JumpStation) which used up bandwidth. As relatively few people submitted their sites, ALIWEB was not very widely used.
Martijn Koster, who was also instrumental in the creation of the Robots Exclusion Standard, detailed the background and objectives of ALIWEB with an overview of its functions and framework in the paper he presented at CERN.
Koster is not associated with a commercial website posing as ALIWEB.
English 
Español 
Français