இந்தியாவின் இரண்டு செம்மொழிகள் தென்மொழி, வடமொழி. தென்மொழி வடமொழியின்றும் பிறந்ததன்று, தனிவேர் கொண்டதென்றும், 25+ மொழிகள் தமிழிய (Dravidian) மொழிகள், இந்திய வரலாறு அறிய அவற்றின் ஆய்வுகள் முக்கியம் என்றும் அறிவித்து ஆய்வுலகில் நாட்டியவை மேலைப்பல்கலைக் கழகங்களே, விஞ்ஞானம், தொழில்நுட்ப வளர்ச்சிக்கும், தமிழின் உலகப் பராவலுக்கும் மேலைநாடுகளின் பல்கலை ஆய்வு கண்ட இணையவெளி பயன்படுகிறது. ஆறாந்திணை என்பதே எண்ணிறந்த வலைப்பக்கங்கள் தான். அவை யாவற்றையும், அணுஅணுவாக அறிந்த துழாவி அதன் தெய்வம் என்பது பொருத்தமானது.
நா. கணேசன்
Jonathon Fletcher: forgotten father of the search engine
By Joe MillerBBC News
Until researchers tracked him down a few years ago, Jonathon Fletcher was not aware he had built the first modern search engine
As Google celebrates its 15th birthday, the web giant has become a byword for information retrieval.
But if you put Jonathon Fletcher's name into a Google search, none of the immediate results hint to the role he played in the development of the world wide web.
There is certainly nothing that credits him as the father of the modern search engine.
Yet 20 years ago, in a computer lab at the University of Stirling in Scotland, Mr Fletcher invented the world's first web-crawling search engine - the very technology that powers Google, Bing, Yahoo and all the major search tools on the web today.
Solving search
In 1993, the web was in its infancy.
Mosaic, the first popular browser with an interface that resembles the ones we use today, had just been released, and the total amount of web pages numbered in the thousands.
But the question of how to find things on the web had not been solved.
Continue reading the main story
What is a web crawler?
- Fairly simple automated program, or script
- Used in search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo
- Sometimes called a web spider or bot
- "Crawls" through web pages, creating an index of their content
- Reads visible text, links and tags on a web page, and feeds these into a searchable database
Mosaic had a page called What's New, which indexed new websites as they were created.
The problem was that in order for developers at Mosaic to be aware of a new website, its creators would have to write to the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign - where the browser's team were based.
At about this time, Jonathon Fletcher was a promising graduate of the University of Stirling, with an offer to study for a PhD at the University of Glasgow.
Before he could take his place, funding at Glasgow was cut, and Mr Fletcher found himself at a loose end.
"I was suddenly very motivated to find a source of income," he recalls, "so I went back to my university and got a job working for the technology department."
It was in this job that he first encountered the world wide web and Mosaic's What's New page.
While working at at his alma mater, the University of Stirling, Jonathon Fletcher discovered the world of the web
'A better way'
While building a web server for the university, Fletcher realised the What's New page was fundamentally flawed.
Because websites were added to the list manually, there was nothing to track changes to their content. Consequently, many of the links were quickly out-of-date or wrongly labelled.
"If you wanted to see what had changed you had to go back and look," Mr Fletcher says of Mosaic's links.
"With a degree in computing science and an idea that there had to be a better way, I decided to write something that would go and look for me."
That something was the world's first web crawler.
Mr Fletcher called his invention JumpStation. He put together an index of pages which could then be searched by a web crawler, essentially an automated process that visits, and indexes, every link on every web page it comes across. The process continues until the crawler runs out of things to visit.
Ten days later, on 21 December 1993, JumpStation ran out of things to visit. It had indexed 25,000 pages.
To date, Google has indexed over a trillion pages.
Birth of search
Mr Fletcher quickly built an easy-to-navigate search tool for the index, stuck his website on Mosaic's What's New page, and the world's first modern search engine was in operation.
Continue reading the main story
“Start Quote
Google didn't come out until 1998 and what Jonathon was doing was in 1993”
Prof Mark SandersonRoyal Melbourne Institute of Technology
"I would say that he is the father of the web search engine," says Prof Mark Sanderson of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, who has studied the history of information retrieval.
"There have obviously been computers doing searches for a very long time, and there were certainly search engines before the web. But Jonathon was the first person to create a search engine that had all the components of a modern search engine."
However, while Google's founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page are household names, Mr Fletcher, who now lives in Hong Kong, has received little recognition for his role in the evolution of the internet.
The fact that his project was ultimately abandoned may not have helped.
As JumpStation grew, it required more and more investment - something which the University of Stirling was not willing to provide.
"It ran on a shared server," explains Mr Fletcher. "There wasn't a lot of disk space and back then disks were small and expensive."
Space control
By June of 1994, JumpStation had indexed 275,000 pages. Space constraints forced Mr Fletcher to only index titles and headers of web pages, and not the entire content of the page, but even with this compromise, JumpStation started to struggle under the load.
And so did Mr Fletcher. "It wasn't my job," he says. "My job was to keep the student labs running and do system administration and technology odd jobs."
Mosaic's What's New page, pictured here months before JumpStation was founded, was a basic index of websites
A job offer to go and work in Tokyo proved too strong to resist, and the university did little to try and keep him, or JumpStation, from leaving.
"I was obviously not very successful in convincing them of its potential," says Mr Fletcher.
"At the time I did what I thought was right, but there have been moments in the last 20 years where I've looked back."
Prof Leslie Smith, head of Computing Science and Mathematics at the University of Stirling, who remembers Mr Fletcher, acknowledged that JumpStation "proved to be ahead of its time", and told the BBC that "colleagues at Stirling are delighted he is gaining the recognition he deserves for his achievements".
Looking forward
But despite the disappointment Mr Fletcher suffered, his pioneering technology would be the foundation of all subsequent web search engines.
"The web community in 1993 was very small," says Prof Sanderson. "Anybody who was doing anything on the web would've known about JumpStation.
"By the middle of 1994 it was becoming clear that web search engines were going to be very important. Google didn't come out until 1998 and what Jonathon was doing was in 1993."
Jonathon Fletcher (centre) at a conference in Dublin earlier this year, where he was the guest speaker on a panel alongside Google and Yahoo! representatives
Mr Fletcher received some recognition for his achievements at a conference in Dublin a few weeks ago, where he was on a panel with representatives from Microsoft, Yahoo and Google. But in his speech, he talked about the future.
"In my opinion, the web isn't going to last forever," he told the audience. "But the problem of finding information is."
"The desire to search through content and find information is independent of the medium."
The current medium is making a lot of money for those who followed him, but the Scarborough-born pioneer has no regrets.
"My parents are proud of me, my wife is proud of me, my children are proud of me, and that's worth quite a lot to me, so I'm quite happy."
It’s an utterly banal observation to state that internet search has become a ubiquitous part of most people’s lives.
But it still is a kind of miracle nonetheless.
Almost all of us with an internet connection of any sort surely use a search engine daily, most likely
Google, so popular and so much a part of life that it has become a small “g” verb. People even use them as multifunctional tools: they’re spellcheckers, measurement and currency converters, calculators (yes, they do that too) and more.
However, it’s the search function that still astonishes, if you take a moment to think about it.
Have a question, any question, from the simple to the most infernally complex? The answers are all there, even though getting them has become such an everyday bit of magic that those of us who grew up in an analogue, internetless world forget the labour and time it took to get information pre-web.
How to build an engine
But search engines did not spring into being, fully formed, at the dawn of the internet age.
Back in the early days, when there were far fewer internet sites – much less those new, visual representations of information online known as web pages that began to emerge in the 1990s – it was very, very hard to find things online.
You had to already know what you were looking for, and where on the internet it was located. It was as if you had to know, in advance, the exact title and location of a book you were looking for in a library. You couldn’t just arrive and search for suggested books on the topic of sailing, or the 1916 Rising, or growing roses.
A Dublin audience was brought back to those early days in a fascinating panel discussion that kicked off the recent 36th annual Sigir (Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval) conference held at Trinity College.
Among the panelists for the keynote session in the Mansion House was
Jonathan Fletcher. He is now working in Hong Kong in the banking information technology sector but, back in the day, he was the fellow who set up the very first internet search engine, Jumpstation.
“I had one problem. I knew nothing about information retrieval, but like a lot of coders, I had an itch to scratch – so you write code. What I wrote was very, very simple. I would go visit a couple of URLs, and record that I’d collected them,” he told the audience.
He hand-entered information about each site – “I settled for the [web page] titles and headings” – and created a search engine that let people search by either titles or headings. Simple, but revolutionary. Within six months, by the end of 1993, he’d documented 25,000 pages in this way. A year later, he’d done 280,000. It was an extraordinary labour of love, done for free to help others, like so many of the web’s best features and tools.
But of course, pre-search engines, there was no easy way for an internet user to even find out that Jumpstation existed. Like everyone else interested in promoting their new website, he submitted it to Mosaic, the first web browser, who listed it on their “What’s New” page (anyone else remember that? I recall how exciting it was to check the page for the latest websites that had come into being – so many, so quickly, on so many subjects).
It featured there for only a day, but the power of the crowd was already emerging as an internet phenomenon, and word of mouth ensured internet users worldwide began to use Jumpstation. The site quickly faded away, though, as Fletcher took a job in Hong Kong and found he didn’t have time to work and have a personal life and also maintain the site. But it seeded the ground for what was to come – index sites such as Yahoo, the first search engines such as Ask Jeeves, Excite and AltaVista, and ultimately Google, Bing and new challengers such as
WolframAlpha and
DuckDuckGo.
Future of searching
Towards the end of the discussion, Fletcher nailed the biggest challenge for today’s search engines: “The amount of signal that everyone else is scrambling for is very small.” Billions of webpages, and many of them junk, are noise obscuring the “signal” pages that contain good information in response to a query.
He believes the web is just today’s presentation format for information online – just as the command line interface, just text on the screen, was once the way people accessed the internet, before the era of the world wide web. “In my opinion, the web isn’t going to last forever,” he said. “But the problem of finding information is.”
1 comments:
நன்றி முனைவர் கணேசன் அவர்களே!
மிக நல்ல சிந்தனை. மனிதன் தன்னுருக்கொண்டு இறைவனைப் படைத்தான் என்பதற்கு ஐந்திணைக் கோட்பாட்டை முன்வைத்து நல்லதொரு சிந்தனையைப் பகிர்ந்துள்ளீர்கள். இப்படிச் சொல்லும் போது ஏதோ மனிதன் உயர்வு என்பது போல் படும். (ஆதி சங்கரர் என்பு தோல் போர்த்திய உடலுக்கு ஜீவனே ஈஷ்வரன் என்கிறார். அது ஒரு புறம்). எனவே, கண்ணன் யசோதைக்குக் காட்டிய விஸ்வரூபம் (மண்ணைத்தின்று வாயில் உலகைக் காட்டுதல்) என்பதில் எப்படி பிரபஞ்சத்தில் ஒன்றுக்குள் ஒன்றெனப் பின்னிப்பிணைந்திருக்கிறதோ அது போல் ஐந்திணை கொண்ட பூவுலகிலும் இறைவன் தன்னை மக்கள் மனதிற்கொப்ப இணைத்துக்கொள்கிறான் என்று காண்பதே பொருந்தும். If God is a metaphor, then there are different metaphors for different landscapes.
அடுத்து ஆறாம்திணையின் கடவுள் யார் எனும் போது ஒரு தேடுபொறி தொழில் நுட்பத்தை முன்வைக்கிறீர்கள். நாகூர் ஆண்டவர் போல், கூகுள் ஆண்டவர் என்ற சொல்லாக்கத்தை முன்மொழிகிறீர்கள். ஒரு தேடுபொறிக்கு இத்தனை மரியாதை தேவையா? என்ற கேள்வி எழுகிறது. தேடுதல் தகவல்க் களஞ்சியத்திற்கு அவசியம். இல்லை என்று சொல்லவில்லை. ஆயினும் சமகால தேடுபொறிகளின் தீவிரம் வெறும் 25% என்று படித்த ஞாபகம். தேடுபொறிக்குள் விழாத தகவலே இன்னும் அதிகமாய் உள்ளது. அந்த 25% தகவலே நமக்கு பிரம்மிப்பைக் கொடுப்பதால் கூகுள் ஆண்டவர் என்று சரணாகதி அடைகிறோம். இது உயர்வு நவிற்சி. அவசியமில்லை என்று தோன்றுகிறது.
ஐந்து திணைகளில் விழாத சிவனை இங்கு நாம் முன்னிருத்தலாம். அவனது அரூப நிலையைக் காட்டலாம். ஆறாம்திணை என்பது ஒரு மெய்நிகர் உலகம். சிந்தனையின் நீட்சி.காலம், வெளி கடந்த ஒரு உலகம். இறைவனின் கல்யாண குணங்களில் முன்னம் மின்னுரு இருந்தது (அதாவது electronic form) என்பதைச் சுட்டும் மிக அழகான பாசுரம். திருமங்கை ஆழ்வார் தனது திருநெடுந்தாண்டகத்தில் அருளிச்செய்தது.
மின்னுருவாய் முன்னுருவில் வேதம் நான்காய் விளக்கொளியாய்
முளைத்தெழுந்த திங்கள் தானாய்,
பின்னுருவாய் முன்னுருவில் பிணிமூப் பில்லாப் பிறப்பிலியாய்
இறப்பதற்கே எண்ணாது, எண்ணும்
பொன்னுருவாய் மணியுருவில் பூதம் ஐந்தாய்ப் புனலுருவாய்
அனலுருவில் திகழுஞ் சோதி,
தன்னுருவாய் என்னுருவில் நின்ற எந்தை தளிர்ப்புரையும்
திருவடி யென்தலை மேலவே.
இது போன்ற பாடல் சிவனுக்கும் கிடைக்கும். கிடைத்தால் சிவனையே நான் முன்மொழிகிறேன்.
அதுபோல் மின்தமிழில் பேசப்படும் அரிய விஷயங்கள் மீளாய்விற்கு உட்படுத்தப்பட வேண்டும், அதில் பல்கலைக்கழகங்களும், அரசும் ஈடுபட வேண்டும் எனும் அரிய கருத்தையும் சொல்லியுள்ளீர்கள். நன்றி.
நா.கண்ணன்
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