Google “inventor of search” and “The world’s most popular search engine will fail you,” says the opening sentence in recent article in the Smithsonian magazine. What Google does deliver in response is the story of Alan Emtage, who invented the world’s first Internet search engine called Archie in 1990.
But the Smithsonian points out, you won’t find the names of the two men who sent the first long-distance computer query in 1963, six years before Arpanet, the internet precursor.
Charles Bourne, a research engineer, and Leonard Chaitin, a computer programmer, both at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California, funded by the Air Force, created a search program. At the time, the magazine notes, most approaches to finding information were physical, such as via data on punch cards sorted by machine. But the Air Force wanted more efficiency to sort through its “trove of literature” about Soviet technology during the Cold War.
The Bourne-Chaitin program worked the way Google does: a user could search for any word in a set of files. To test the program, they input a database of just seven memos Bourne typed onto punched paper tape. From a computer terminal with only 32 characters wide, they sent the first search query. “The precise question is lost to history,” says the Smithsonian.
But the data transferred over telephone lines at a rate 10,000 times slower than your smartphone, delivered the right answer. They had proved that remote computer search was possible. But the Air Force shut the project down. Bourne, now 87, said, “You really couldn’t imagine, at that time, doing a lot of things with a computer.
In a response to the article, Philip Noir noted that “Their efforts had little to do with computer networking and “Only superficially resembles the kind of work done at Google to index the million-headed hydra know as the Internet.”
Wordstream offers a timeline on The History of Search Engines.
