ALIWEB

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title: "ALIWEB" type: doc version: 1 created: 2026-02-28 author: "Wikipedia contributors" status: active scope: public tags: ["history-of-the-internet", "defunct-internet-search-engines", "internet-properties-established-in-1994"] description: "Internet search engine" topic_path: "history" source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALIWEB" license: "CC BY-SA 4.0" wikipedia_page_id: 0 wikipedia_revision_id: 0

::summary Internet search engine ::

::data[format=table title="Infobox website"]

Field	Value
url	{{webarchive
url	https://web.archive.org/web/19970618184044/http://www.nexor.com/public/aliweb/aliweb.html
date	18 June 1997
name	ALIWEB
type	Search engine
launch_date
current_status	Inactive
::

| url = {{webarchive |url=https://web.archive.org/web/19970618184044/http://www.nexor.com/public/aliweb/aliweb.html |date=18 June 1997 |title=ALIWEB | name = ALIWEB | logo = | type = Search engine | launch_date = | current_status = Inactive

ALIWEB (Archie-Like Indexing for the Web) is the first Web search engine.

First announced in November 1993 by developer Martijn Koster while working at Nexor, and presented in May 1994 at the First International Conference on the World Wide Web at CERN in Geneva, ALIWEB preceded WebCrawler by several months.

ALIWEB allows users to submit the locations of index files on their sites which enables the search engine to include webpages and add user-written page descriptions and keywords. This empowers webmasters to define the terms that would lead users to their pages, and also avoided setting bots (e.g. the Wanderer, JumpStation) which used up bandwidth.

Martijn Koster, who was also instrumental in the creation of the Robots Exclusion Standard, detailed the background and objectives of ALIWEB with an overview of its functions and framework in the paper he presented at CERN. Koster left Nexor and in the following years development ceased until a new company took over the project. It was discovered that the database file had actually exceeded the range of search so therefore when you entered a search term it would not search the entire database and weight the results, it would only search from the beginning of the database until it either ran out of results to show or exceeded the number of results requested. The new company developers fixed this by weighting the results and searching the entire database before displaying the results.

References

References

1. Martijn Koster. (30 November 1993). "ANNOUNCEMENT: ALIWEB (Archie-Like Indexing for the WEB)". comp.infosystems).
2. (June 1994). "List of PostScript files for the WWW94 advance proceedings". First International Conference on the World-Wide Web.
3. Chris Sherman. (3 December 2002). "Happy Birthday, Aliweb!". [[Search Engine Watch]].
4. Wes Sonnenreich. (1997). "A History of Search Engines". [[John Wiley & Sons]] website.
5. Martijn Koster. "Robots Exclusion". robotstxt.org.
6. Martijn Koster. "Robots in the Web: threat or treat?". Reprinted with permission from ConneXions, The Interoperability Report, Volume 9, No. 4, April 1995..

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