Incredible you-must-read-this geeky resource: article on history of search by Ramana Rao of Inxight Software:
It’s been nearly 60 years since Vannevar Bush’s seminal Atlantic Monthly
article, “As We May Think,” portrayed the image of a scholar aided by a
machine, “a device in which an individual stores all his books,
records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be
consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility.”
Unmistakably in this is the technology now known as search by millions
and known as information retrieval (IR) by tens of thousands.
From that point in 1945 to now, when some 25 million Web searches an hour are served, a lot has happened.
article, “As We May Think,” portrayed the image of a scholar aided by a
machine, “a device in which an individual stores all his books,
records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be
consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility.”
Unmistakably in this is the technology now known as search by millions
and known as information retrieval (IR) by tens of thousands.
From that point in 1945 to now, when some 25 million Web searches an hour are served, a lot has happened.
In the mid-1980s at Xerox PARC I witnessed the beginnings of a research
effort related to search that has swept me along for nearly 20 years… [emphasis Betsy’s]