Written By Noah Mallin | June 16, 2008 | Share This |

Full House

Papa can you hear me? The idea of indexing raw information and data and using a simple retrieval tool to access this wealth of knowledge has many fathers (we’re looking at you Al Gore) , not unlike the brood on TV’s Full House. Most of us know who Sergey Brin and Jerry Yang are (especially Carl Icahn.) In fact, thanks to their YahOogle adventure we couldn’t get this out on time for Father’s Day — so here’s your belated tie.

For this post we decided to reach back even further into the primordial ooze than usual to retrieve some of the less known pappys of what we today know as “search.” Most of these fellas lived at a time before computers existed, or conceived of them as great room-sized beasts with blinky lights. Without further ado, we bring you the unsung ancient fathers of search.

1) Pliny The Elder (23 AD – 79 AD)

Pliny The Elder (not to be confused with his nephew Pliny The Younger or the 1981 Kiss album Music From “The Elder”) was a Roman who’s real name was Caius Plinius Secundus. Of course Pliny the Elder sounds way cooler. Pliny had the great idea to collect all kinds of information from far-flung sources in 77 AD into one of the first known encyclopedias, the Naturalis Historia. Even better, Pliny remembered to include an index, an essential element for search.

2) Johann Heinrich Zedler (1706 - 1751)

Zedler was a German fellow who expanded on Pliny’s encyclopedia concept by having specialist editors create content instead of doing it all himself. I imagine that they all collaborated on the full title of his collection as well: “Great Complete Encyclopaedia of all Sciences and Arts which so far have been invented and improved by human mind and wit: Including the geographical and political description of the whole world according to all monarchies, empires, kingdoms, principalities, republics, free sovereignties, countries, towns, sea harbours, fortresses, castles, areas, authorities, monasteries, mountains, passes, woods, seas, lakes … and also a detailed historical and genealogical description of the world’s brightest and most famous family lines, the life and deeds of the emperors, kings, electors and princes, great heroes, ministers of state, war leaders… ; equally about all policies of state, war and law and budgetary business of the nobility and the bourgeois, merchants, traders, arts.” So, uh, what’s in your book again Johann? A key element from a search perspective was that this colossus wasn’t static – updates and supplementals were added over the years to make it a dynamic database expanding from 12 to 64 volumes – or as dynamic as 750,000 articles on 62,571 pages got in the 1750s.

3) George Boole (1779- 1848)

George Boole was a mathematician who in the 19^th century pioneered the idea of logic as a mathematical expression. Initially this seemed to live in the realm of philosophy until Claude Shannon wrote a masters’ thesis at MIT which explained how Boolean algebra could be used to improve electromagnetic relays. This became the fundaments of digital circuitry and the marvelous age we live in today (excluding Hot Pockets.) From a search perspective, search engines use Boolean logic to figure out just what it is you might be looking for. My alma mater Ithaca College (motto: “Our hill is so totally higher than Cornell’s. Yes, physically too…” has a handy ice-creamy section on about Boolean search from their library website.

4) Vannevar Bush (1890- 1974)

Aside from lobbying to drop the atom bomb on Japan and providing me with a way-cool potential baby name, Vannever Bush pioneered a little something called the Memex, 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.” He wrote an essay expanding on the idea for the Atlantic Monthly predicting “Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified. I shall call them Wikipedia…” Ok I made up the last line but the dude essentially stumbled on the concept of hypertext.

Topics: Just for Fun, Search: Innovations, Technology |