…you were a very busy man and I’ve been a very busy lady keeping up with you. My last few dizzying days started with a thought to blog the praises of google. A simple post “can’t believe google can give me the answer” has turned into an information sunaime. Not quite knowing where to start, I guess it’s best to explain Jeez, Jeeves. I kind of remembered that before I used google I used www.askjeeves.com. So what did I do, I googled Jeeves. What I found out was he was a sagacious valet character in several books written by English author Sir P.G Wodehouse around 1915. He was a valet, a butler, and helper who fills the model of a “helpful servant”. He was so good at his job that Wodehouse wrote many books about him: Right Ho Jeeves, The Inimitable Jeeves, Carry on Jeeves, Thank you Jeeves, Very good Jeeves, to name a few. It was apparent that Jeeves knew everything and solved any and all problems. It then made sense that if you wanted any information, you went to Jeeves. It also makes sense that the founders Garrett Gruener and David Warthem were in Berkeley, California the home of the University of California campus, where they might have been students and might have even been literary students, in fact I will go so far as to say curious literary students, with the desire to gather information. And in their world who had all the answers, Jeeves of course. Jeeves also was a friendly fellow and the just emerging computer and internet in those early days, did not seem so friendly to many of us, but Jeeves did. So we were not afraid to ask Jeeves.

Talk about friendly Jeeves, how about Archie, Veronica and Jughead, our comic book heroes.

Can’t get any friendly than Archie. This is where my google investigation led me. Back to the first search engine that was developed in 1990. (Google, you tube, ask.com, facebook etc. are all search engines) It was developed by two college students and they named it Archie. Archie gathered information, and rather then call it Archives, Archie was much friendlier. Word of mouth about Archie grew and another group of colleges students developed Veronica and then another college group developed Jughead with the same purpose of gathering information. Veronica and Jughead used Gopher to gather information and also send information and have you guessed it yet? Gopher was created by Archie and how appropriate a name. Gophers dig underground tunnels and an intricate burrow system.

I find it interesting that before the internet everything we knew came from books, even in some cases comic books. So the early beginnings of search engines had names familiar to us. This is just the teeny tiny tip of the iceberg, the Model T ford of internet. How about familiar names like Elon Musk was a creator of x.com which became Pay Pal who created You Tube which Google bought for 1.65 billion. You now know why I was absent from blogging, I felt like Sherlock Holmes. What I was learning led me deeper and deeper and more entangled in all the goings on. I was caught up in the Web like Charlotte did, but this time it was not a spider web but the world wide web. World wide web or is it the wide world web. I must google that.