Overview

ALIWEB, an abbreviation of Archie-Like Indexing for the Web, was an early World Wide Web indexing and search system developed by Martijn Koster while working at Nexor.

The system was announced in 1993 and subsequently presented at the first International World Wide Web Conference.

Unlike crawler-based search systems, ALIWEB did not attempt to discover and describe websites automatically. Participating website administrators could instead provide structured index information describing resources available through their sites.

ALIWEB periodically collected this submitted information and incorporated it into a searchable index.

The approach reduced the need for automated crawlers to repeatedly retrieve material from remote web servers, but depended upon website administrators actively preparing and registering information for inclusion.

ALIWEB therefore represents a distinct early approach to the problem of Web discovery: rather than automatically interpreting the expanding Web, it provided a mechanism through which publishers could describe their own resources for inclusion in a common searchable catalogue.

For catalogue purposes, the Bureau distinguishes this model from the crawler-based approach represented by JumpStation and the later full-text retrieval model represented by WebCrawler.

Preservation Note

The historically significant ALIWEB search service is no longer treated as an operational search system.

Contemporary descriptions, technical documentation, archived webpages, and historical captures provide evidence of the system’s design and public presentation.

The original value of the object depended upon the combination of submitted site descriptions, the maintained central index, and the search service operating over that index. Surviving webpages alone do not reproduce that operational environment.

The Bureau therefore records ALIWEB as a documentary preservation case.