Martijn Koster (born ca 1970) is a Dutch

software engineer Software engineering is a systematic engineering approach to software development. A software engineer is a person who applies the principles of software engineering to design, develop, maintain, test, and evaluate computer software. The term ''p ...

noted for his pioneering work on Internet searching. Koster created ALIWEB, the

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...

's first search engine, which was announced in November 1993 while working at

Nexor Nexor Limited is a privately held company based in Nottingham, providing product and services to safeguard government, defence and critical national infrastructure computer systems. It was originally known as X-Tel Services Limited. History Ne ...

and presented in May 1994 at the First International Conference on the

World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet. Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web ...

. Koster also developed ArchiePlex, a search engine for FTP sites that pre-dates the Web, and CUSI, a simple tool that allowed you to search different search engines in quick succession, useful in the early days of search when services provided varying results. Koster also created the

Robots Exclusion Standard The robots exclusion standard, also known as the robots exclusion protocol or simply robots.txt, is a standard used by websites to indicate to visiting web crawlers and other web robots which portions of the site they are allowed to visit. Th ...

References

Living people Dutch software engineers Dutch computer scientists 1970 births {{Netherlands-bio-stub