Search

When was the last time you wanted some information and it wasn’t within your reach? Well, barring nuclear codes and Death Star plans, search engines have brought information literally at your fingertips.

- Arnab Mukherjee

We’ve come a long way from primitive filing and indexing systems to the modern day million-results-under a-second nature of search systems and it wasn’t always this easy.

The Memex Idea

While a simple Google search would tell you the origin of web search was around the 1980’s, the actual concept of an indexed search goes quite further in the past beyond that. In his article ‘As we may think’ published in the Atlantic Monthly in July 1945, Vannevar Bush proposed the idea of a virtually limitless,fast, reliable, extensible, associative memory storage and retrieval system. He named this device a memex.

Although his original vision was more in line with what Wikipedia is now, the most important part of his concept was the “associative trail”, which was pretty close to what hypertext is now. To begin with, information is assumed to be stored on microfilms. The associative trail would be a method to create a linear sequence of such microfilms across an arbitrary number of microfilms. This would be achieved by creating physical pointers that would permanently join a pair of microfilms. With multiple such combinations, the goal was to create a chain of such links to quickly traverse through related information. A pioneer in the the work done on the first hypertext system in the 1960s and the creator of the term ‘hypertext’, Ted Nelson credited Bush as his main influence.