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

search engine A search engine is a software system that provides hyperlinks to web pages, and other relevant information on World Wide Web, the Web in response to a user's web query, query. The user enters a query in a web browser or a mobile app, and the sea ...

s for the

World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW or simply the Web) is an information system that enables Content (media), content sharing over the Internet through user-friendly ways meant to appeal to users beyond Information technology, IT specialists and hobbyis ...

(WWW). It was developed in September 1993 by Oliver McBryan at the University of Colorado as a research project. 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. 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 high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Though Perl is not officially an acronym, there are various backronyms in use, including "Practical Extraction and Reporting Language". Perl was developed ...

regular expressions A regular expression (shortened as regex or regexp), sometimes referred to as rational expression, is a sequence of character (computing), characters that specifies a pattern matching, match pattern in string (computer science), text. Usually ...

. 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 portal that provides the search engine Yahoo Search and related services including My Yahoo, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, y!entertainment, yahoo!life, and its a ...

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

References

Sources

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