Similar Developments: The Steam Engine And The Search Engine.

History repeats itself. If we can predict how the world-wide-web will transform society we may situate ourselves directly in the path it will grow. One way to gain perspective on the impact of the internet is to look at the development of similar world changing inventions. By focusing on some of the principles that defined the Industrial Age, perhaps we can understand more about what s happening today in the Digital Age. The development of steam engine and the development of the search engine bear interesting comparisons.

In November 2006 NetCraft, a UK firm that monitors the Internet announced that the World Wide Web now contains over a hundred million websites. Furthermore, analysts believe the net should reach two hundred million domains by 2010 and could grow exponentially larger by 2015. A good reliable unbiased search engine has never been so important. How else will humanity ever find what they are looking for?

On November 7th, 1885 Donald Alexander Smith the Lord Strathcona and Mount Royal hammered home the last spike in the first Canadian transcontinental main line at Craigellachie B.C. in the Eagle Pass. Sir William Cornelius Van Horne made his famous fifteen-word speech, "All I can say is that the work has been well done in every way". They were standing on almost 2,753 miles of track that had been laid across the Dominion of Canada. What none of the men around them knew was that the Canadian Pacific Railroad was critically short of good reliable steam locomotives. The firm had only a dozen engines of their own, and half of these were so old they were not considered capable of hauling anything beyond their own weight up (or down) the very steep 4.5% gradient of the Kicking Horse Mountain Pass. There was a steam engine shortage in Canada and all over the world in the 1880 s and the historic Robert Stephenson & Co. foundry in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in England (which had been contracted to provide at least two more engines for CPR) was absolutely swamped with orders. In July 1886 Stephenson had promised two hundred and nine units to various railroads all over the world. By 1899, his four horse shop had built over three thousand steam locomotives. For the purpose of our comparisons, he was the Google of his day. He had a good reliable product that delivered results, even under the most severe conditions or steep inclines.

In the same way corporations race to get online today, in the 1880s nations all over the world were anxiously building railroads. Steam driven rail transport was the respiratory system of the Industrial Age and simply put it breathed in raw materials and exhaled money. The steam engine itself was the high technology advance of the day and over a period of about fifty years it changed the entire world. The railway regulated the flow of goods like no other mass transportation system in existence - it siphoned surpluses and fixed deficits overnight. Steel rails created markets where none had existed before, and by 1900 this improvement had revolutionized every sector of society, ferrying goods and passengers for commerce while forever changing agriculture, manufacturing and military mobilization. The search engine, on the other hand, is the respiratory system of the Digital Age and it will do all the same things, but in different ways.

Just as the steam engine was developed before the railroad, the search engine was created before the Internet. Gerald Salton a Harvard professor in 1958 developed SMART (System for the Mechanical Analysis and Retrieval of Text) which was a reader machine designed to sort through data stored on optical disks. He refined the machine s electronic program to analyze document texts, formulate appropriate user queries, conduct rapid file searches, and rank the retrieved items in decreasing order of importance to the users. Although he died in 1996, Professor Salton will forever be considered the father of the modern search engine. From his evaluation tests of SMART, he formulated general rules for automatic language processing. This methodology is still available free at Cornel University and was extensively implemented in the first generation search engines.

Just as Archimedes principles governed the development of steam engines, the history of modern search engine can be traced back to key mathematical concepts and Boolean Logic. George Boole, an English mathematician at University College Cork defined an algebraic system of logic in the mid 19th century that was central to the development of electronic circuits and computers.

Of course some mention must be made of Doug Engelbart and his revolutionary ideas of word processing in the 1960 s and 70 s, and of Xerox s equally revolutionary think-tank PARC, the Palo Alto Research Center. McGill University student Alan Emtage who created FTP indexing search tool Archie is recognized as a key developer, and so is Mark McCahill, introduced Archie s alternative, Gopher one year later. Veronica , Archie's girlfriend in the comic books, and the "grandmother of search engines", appears on the scene in 1992 spidering Gopherspace texts. Jughead arrived in 1993.

In the meantime, the World Wide Web was created by Tim Berners-Lee and released by CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research). According to stats taken in 1994 most North American university students had, at least once, eaten a pizza that had been ordered online. That same year, perhaps in response to the need for a search engine, Jerry Yang and David Filo of Stanford University started Yahoo! which legend says might be short for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle," but the two creators insist they selected the name because they considered themselves yahoos.

1995 and 1996 were for the Internet what the entire 1880 s was for the railroad industry. Metacrawler and Excite appeared in the summer of 1995, AltaVista debuted later that fall. Inktomi and HotBot made their appearance in mid 1996 and AskJeeves and GoTo and many more search engines appeared just after them. Yahoo, which was actually a directory, was the early leader, but AltaVista, meaning "a view from above" was fast gaining popularity even before it was bought by Compaq in 1997.

In late 1998 Stanford's Larry Page and Sergey Brin reinvent search ranking technology with their paper "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine" and start what some time later becomes the most successful search engine in the world, Google.

Google s uncluttered interface, speed and search result relevancy were cornerstones in winning the tech-savvy people, who were later followed by pretty much everyone looking for something online. In the year 2000, Google and Yahoo formed a partnership which saw Google handle over one hundred million daily search requests by the end of the year. Other contenders, like MSN, find it difficult to compete.

Just as the imperialist nations used railroads to corner markets, search engine optimization has now become a huge industry where experts try to boost the rankings of commercial websites. Today, Google gets over two hundred two million hits per day, and has over three billion indexed WWW pages. The company is hated and loved at the same time but is undeniably the most relevant search engine available today (and biggest player in the field). Google is constantly coming up with new, focused services to enhance information searches including image searches, maps and even the incredible Google Earth which features real time satellite photographs of the Earth s surface for paid subscribers.

Like search engine development, railway building had been a big business venture in Canada since February 25, 1832 when the Champlain and St. Lawrence Railroad incorporated in Montreal. The C&SL was financed by brewery owner, John Molson. British North America's first locomotive arrived at Molson's wharf in Montreal in June 1836. It was named Dorchester and had been constructed by Robert Stephenson in a foundry on Newcastle-on-Tyne, the very heart of industrial England. Incidentally it was the 127th steam engine the firm had made, and it was accompanied across the ocean by merchants who settled in Quebec. Two new fellows, Thomas Farina and his brother Nicolas opened dry goods businesses on both ends of the track and their firm was the first customer to use the railroad (other than the brewery) to move boxed freight up and down the line 1837. At this time the cars had to be pulled by horses as the weight was too much for all early British steam engines.

Thomas Farina s business succeeded despite technological egress in steam engine development because his firm harnessed the potential of the track itself to centralize supply in Montreal and send stock to meet demand as it occurred in stores along the line. This same business model was perhaps the inspiration for Timothy Eaton s Catalogue and numerous other examples of mercantile success along railroad systems.

The Industrial Age changed everyone s lives. Initially venture capitalists became rich while the working class seemed to grow poorer, but as opportunities present themselves equally in Democratic society the middle class emerged strong enough in the early 1900 s to buy themselves a car in the Automotive Age.

The Digital Age will change our lives in ways we can only begin to imagine. So many people on this planet are doing business over the internet it s hard to ignore the gradual emergence of a New World Order. Village women in Africa now sell woven baskets directly to buyers in big cities in Europe and North America strictlyafrica.com. Terrorists in Iraq defy the West to broadcast their messages to supporters via iraqimedianet.net. India and Pakistan have become the call centers of the planet, while Taiwan remains its silicon workshop. In the 2005, NetCraft reported the Internet s combined annual online sales total at $39.2 billion It s almost twice that today. The figure has grown exponentially since 1996 and continues to climb higher as more people grow more comfortable shopping online for more of what they want.

Because information is the currency of the internet, all the knowledge needed for success is available online. A Google search is one effective way to mine relevant data, but only by visiting the smithies and foundries of the net will entrepreneurs ever really understand the trends. Only by reading the content available on progressive web designer s home pages can consumers and next generation e-business owners ever hope to stay abreast of new developments. I have found excellent resources at many sites, especially Lifecapture Interactive in their library of forward looking Possibilities Papers.

All facets of e-commerce and e-marketing are dissected and analyzed in a number of easy to read articles at this premier website. This domain makes it possible for marketing executives to envision exactly how they may apply state-of-the-art advertising techniques to snowball their businesses online. The papers are designed to excite the imagination and stimulate development. Blogging, Podcasts, Affiliate Marketing, Viral Marketing, Search Engine Optimization and Website Security are all discussed here in great detail, and it s all free.

By: Robert Hugh Campbell

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