JumpStation

{{Short description|Early internet search engine}}

{{Use dmy dates|date=April 2022}}

{{Infobox website

| name = Jump Station

| logo =

| screenshot = Jumpstation.png

| caption =

| collapsible =

| collapsetext =

| commercial =

| type = Web search engine

| language = English

| registration =

| programming_language=

| owner = Jonathon Fletcher

| launch_date = {{start date and age|df=yes|1993|12|12}}

| current_status = Defunct/Closed 1994

| revenue =

| alexa =

}}

JumpStation was the first WWW search engine that behaved, and appeared to the user, the way current web search engines do.[http://www.metro.co.uk/news/article.html?Why_we_nearly_McGoogled_it&in_article_id=582089 Why we nearly McGoogled it] Metro, 15 March 2009 It started indexing on 12 December 1993[http://stuff.mit.edu/afs/sipb/user/mkgray/tmp/coolwwwmail Archive of email sent to Matt Gray] and was announced on the Mosaic "What's New" webpage on 21 December 1993.Archive of NCSA's [https://web.archive.org/web/20010620073530/http://archive.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/Mosaic/Docs/old-whats-new/whats-new-1293.html What's New, December 1993] It was hosted at the University of Stirling in Scotland.

It was written by Jonathon Fletcher, from Scarborough, England,[http://www.robotstxt.org/db/jumpstation.html The Web Robots Pages: JumpStation][https://web.archive.org/web/20090328225441/http://www.slais.ubc.ca/COURSES/libr500/00-01-wt2/www/E_Hernandez/EarlySpiders.htm Robots, Spiders and Wanderers: Finding Information on the Web] archived 28 March 2009 from [http://www.slais.ubc.ca/COURSES/libr500/00-01-wt2/www/E_Hernandez/EarlySpiders.htm the original] who graduated from the University with a first class honours degree in Computing Science in the summer of 1992[http://www.scotsman.com/latestnews/Googling-was-born-in-Stirling.5073256.jp Googling was born in Stirling] The Scotsman, 15 March 2009 and has subsequently been named "father of the search engine".{{cite news|last=Miller|first=Joe|date=3 September 2013|title=Jonathon Fletcher: forgotten father of the search engine|work=BBC News|url=https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23945326|access-date=10 September 2013}}

He was subsequently employed there as a systems administrator. JumpStation's development discontinued when he left the University in late 1994, having failed to get any investors, including the University of Stirling, to financially back his idea. At this point the database had 275,000 entries spanning 1,500 servers.[https://web.archive.org/web/20090328134137/http://www.ambrosiasw.com/~fprefect/matrix/js.html Matrix, Search Engines: JumpStation] archived 28 March 2009 from [http://www.ambrosiasw.com/~fprefect/matrix/js.html the original]

JumpStation used document titles and headings to index the web pages found using a simple linear search, and did not provide any ranking of results.[http://www.searchenginehistory.com/ SearchEngineHistory.com] However, JumpStation had the same basic shape as Google Search in that it used an index solely built by a web robot, searched this index using keyword queries entered by the user on a web form whose location was well-known,Oliver A. McBryan: GENVL and WWWW: Tools for Taming the Web, Oscar Nierstrasz (Ed.), Proceedings of the First International World Wide Web Conference, Geneva, Switzerland, May 1994 (Ref 9). and presented its results in the form of a list of URLs that matched those keywords.