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History - The Blog of Lists

The list of Yahoo's Top 10 all-time searches

March 8th 2010 05:32

The history of accessible online search engines, boys and girls, goes way back to the pre-Gen Y days of 1995.

Oh, yes, you can argue, as they do here, that the concept of hypertext and memory extension can be traced to Vannevar Bush's wonderfully crazy data storage ideas in 1945 ...

And you can argue that the first online search engine was Archie (archives — get it?), created in 1990 by a Montreal university student named Alan Emtage ...

And you can argue that Excite, introduced in 1993, and Lycos, Webcrawler, Galaxy and Altavista, all introduced in 1994, are worthy of mention ...

But the truth is that the only really important moment in search engine history that does not feature the word Google came in April 1994 when David Filo and Jerry Yang the Yahoo! Directory.

And now Yahoo!, the company with the exclamation mark in its name which has generated much debate about whether or not it is grammatically correct to use a comma after it to denote a pause, is celebrating its 15th birthday.

As part of its birthday celebrations, Yahoo! has produced a list of the 10 most popular searches in its 15-year history. The list is a fascinating insight into the things we think about. Take out the predictable disasters, and we are a banal lot.

The Yahoo! 15-year Top 10

1. September 11

2. Cloning

3. Iraq war

4. Saddam Hussein

5. Harry Potter book releases

6. Michael Jackson death

7. Steve Irwin death

8. Tsunami

9. Enron scandal

10. The Millennium

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Posted By: Chris Champion - Category: History, Internet, Technology

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Fascinating facts about the smiley face

March 9th 2009 19:05

The story of the invention of the text smiley face, possibly the most recognisable of all the novelties of the internet age, was lost until 2002 when an American researcher tracked down the inventor, and the message in which he used it.

The researcher's name is Mike Jones. He was a student at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, in the early 1980s, and he had a theory that the first ever text smiley face appeared on the university's bulletin board. Bulletin boards were a popular early manifestation of the internet, and Jones set out, in 2002, to see if he could trace the birth of the smiley about 20 years earlier.

After what Jones himself described as "a significant effort to locate it", the original post, made by Scott Fahlman on the CMU CS general bboard (Carneegie Mellon University Computer Science general bulletin board) was retrieved on September 10, 2002 by Jeff Baird from an October 1982 backup tape.

To find the original post, Jones had first to look through old bulletin board program sources, known as Bags, to determine a filename that the post might be found under. The filename was eventually found to be /usr/cmu/lib/bb/general.bb). Jones then asked Howard Wactlar, the former School of Computer Sciences facilities director, whether the file could be restored. Scott Fahlman himself provided data narrowing the probable span of time during which the post was made. Wactlar and Bob Cosgrove, the current director, determined that backup tapes from that period (1981-1983) still existed and asked Jeff Baird of the facilities staff to try to find and restore the post. Dave Livingston of facilities located a working nine-track tape drive and a machine to use it on. Kirk Berthold and Michael Riley in CS operations managed retrieving tapes from off-site archival storage. Graduate student Dan Pelleg's FreeBSD machine was used to read the 4.1BSD dump format tapes using a compatibility mode in the restore program.

According to Mike Jones, Jeff Baird should get most of the credit for doing the hard work of locating and retrieving the data. "He kept asking for more tapes, reading those that could still be read, narrowing the date range, and sticking with it until the post was found," said Jones.

The original post by Scott Fahlman read:

19-Sep-82 11:44 Scott E Fahlman : - )
From: Scott E Fahlman <Fahlman at Cmu-20c>

I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers:

: - )

Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark
things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use : - (

Note: Spaces have been inserted in the smilies in Fahlman's original message. In a sign of the times, the Orble blogging interface would turn them into graphical smilies if they were written without the spaces.

Fahlman's bulletin board post was part of an ongoing dialogue about the problem of humorous or ironic posts not being understood as such, with possible negative consequences. Other methods had been suggested (such as writing "Joke" or [J]) but had been rejected. Fahlman's elegant solution was in use on bulletin boards around the world within a few years.

research.microsoft.com, news.medill.northwestern.edu, en.wikipedia.com, www.straightdope.com

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