I’m at TechStars for a Day watching my partner Ryan McIntyre give a presentation on Excite where he was a founder. Each time he gives this presentation, it reminds me of the very first web spider – at least that I’m aware of. Can you name it?
It’s the World Wide Web Wanderer (also known as W4 – which created the Wandex index.) The creator was Matthew Gray which was one of the co-founders of NetGenesis – my first angel investment. Matthew was one of the gang (including my close friend Raj Bhargava – now the CEO of StillSecure) who showed me the web (and Freshman Fishwrap) for the first time at an Athena Cluster in the Student Center at MIT in 1994.
Ah – nostalgia. Matthew has some great old stats up on his old MIT page, including a summary of web growth. According to Wandex, on 6/93 there were 130 web sites. 130. A year later on 6/94 there were 2,738. By 6/95 the web was up to 23,500 and by 6/96 it was 230,000. Oh the way we were.
It’s amazing what has occurred in the past 15 years.