Web Crawler: The Invisible made Visible

This is one of my sculptures shown during Forth Valley Open Studios, which ends this evening.



It forms part of a pair called The Invisible made Visible inspired by pieces of software known as bots, spiders or web crawlers that trawl the internet gathering information.

Imagine my surprise therefore when a visitor to my studio, a lecturer at Stirling University, asked if I was aware that one of the first web crawlers was invented at Stirling University in the early 1990s.


Jonathon Fletcher at Stirling University invented Jump Station but it caused the Internet to crash and never went anywhere. Later the more popular web crawlers Lycos and Yahoo were invented.

1994 is regarded as the watershed for search engines.

Brian Pinkerton computer scientist at Washington university created a robot called a Web Crawler in 1994 because he wanted to " cut to the chase "and didn't have the time to surf the net looking for interesting sites so he constructed a bit of software that did it for him.
And thus was born the first web Crawler.

The image evoked by Pinkerton's robot "crawling" the web caught the imagination of programmers.

Crawler based search engines proliferated in 1994 and many were based in academic institutions such as Stirling Univers.ity