The World Wide Web Worm (WWWW) was one of the earliest

search engine A search engine is a software system designed to carry out web searches. They search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a textual web search query. The search results are generally presented in a ...

s for 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 ...

(WWW). It is claimed by some to be the first search engine, though it was not released until March 1994, by which time a number of other search engines had been made publicly available. It was developed in September 1993 by Oliver McBryan at the

University of Colorado The University of Colorado (CU) is a system of public universities in Colorado. It consists of four institutions: University of Colorado Boulder, University of Colorado Colorado Springs, University of Colorado Denver, and the University o ...

as a research project. The worm created a database of 300,000 multimedia objects which could be obtained or searched for keywords via the WWW. It indexed about 110,000 webpages as of 1994. In contrast to present-day

s, the WWWW featured support for

Perl Perl is a family of two high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming languages. "Perl" refers to Perl 5, but from 2000 to 2019 it also referred to its redesigned "sister language", Perl 6, before the latter's name was offic ...

regular expressions A regular expression (shortened as regex or regexp; sometimes referred to as rational expression) is a sequence of characters that specifies a search pattern in text. Usually such patterns are used by string-searching algorithms for "find" o ...

. The website, http://www.cs.colorado.edu/home/mcbryan/WWWW.html, is no longer accessible
archive
. Circa 1997 Goto.com purchased WWWW's technology. McBryan stated in a 2016 podcast that WWWW was an educational project and he never thought of commercializing it like Excite or

Yahoo! Yahoo! (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and operated by the namesake company Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds managed by Apollo Global Mana ...

did, partly because the University did not have a department that dealt specifically with such computer technology.

Notes

* Oliver A. McBryan. ''GENVL and WWWW: Tools for Taming the Web''. Research explained at First International Conference on the World Wide Web. CERN, Geneva (Switzerland), May 25-26-27, 1994
web.Archive.org: ggy ''www.cs.colorado.edu/home/mcbryan/mypapers/www94.ps''pdf version

References

{{searchengine-website-stub Internet search engines Internet properties established in 1994