Aliweb

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ALIWEB (Archie Like Indexing for the Web) is the Web's first search engine. Its predecessors were either built with different purposes (as it is the case with the World Wide Web Wanderer) or were literally just indexers (as were Archie, Gopher, Veronica and Jughead). It was released in October 1993 and first presented at the First International Conference on the World-Wide Web in Geneva in 1994.

ALIWEB allows users to submit the location of an index file on their site (named "site.idx"), which enables the search engine to include their Web pages and add a user-written page description and keywords. This empowers webmasters, who can define the terms that lead users to their pages and also avoids setting bots (such as the Wanderer) which uses bandwidth. Its original programmer, Martijn Koster, was also instrumental in the creation of the Robots Exclusion Standard.<ref name="koster">Koster, Martijn (March 1994). ALIWEB - Archie-Like Indexing in the WEB. Retrieved on May 17, 2006.</ref> In his paper, Koster discusses the background and objectives of ALIWEB, as well as providing an overview of how it functioned and some insight into its framework.

ALIWEB is currently undergoing a total rewrite of the programing code and is set to re-launch in 2007 as a competitor to Google, MSN, and Yahoo. The current site reflects the very last update of the original database. At ALIWEB's start in 1993, the entire database was so small that the original program only searched from the beginning until it had the required number of results requested to display. The search program was reprogrammed by the new development team to search the entire database and then report the best matches through a weighted system. The database is no longer updated and is largely outdated, but is maintained for historical purposes.

A list (called "AliLinks") of approximately 500 of the most popular sites on the Internet is maintained on the ALIWEB home page. Some of these links are also outdated.