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ought the Internet much closer to all of us by fantastically improving
the quality of search on the network. Specialty search engines can do
this even better. The idea of “intranet” search engines, search engines
that search within the network of a particular institution, is to provide
users of that institution with better access to material from that institution.
Businesses do this all the time, enabling employees to have access
to material that people outside the business can’t get. Universities
do it as well.
These engines are enabled by the network technology itself. Microsoft,
for example, has a network file system that makes it very easy
for search engines tuned to that network to query the system for information
about the publicly (within that network) available content.
Jesse’s search engine was built to take advantage of this technology. It
used Microsoft’s network file system to build an index of all the files
available within the RPI network.
Jesse’s wasn’t the first search engine built for the RPI network. Indeed,
his engine was a simple modification of engines that others had
built. His single most important improvement over those engines was
to fix a bug within the Microsoft file-sharing system that could cause a
user’s computer to crash. With the engines that existed before, if you
tried to access a file through a Windows browser that was on a computer
that was off-line, your computer could crash. Jesse modified the
system a bit to fix that problem, by adding a button that a user could
click to see if the machine holding the file was still on-line.
Jesse’s engine went on-line in late October. Over the following six
months, he continued to tweak it to improve its functionality. By
March, the system was functioning quite well. Jesse had more than one
million files in his directory, including every type of content that might
be on users’ computers.
Thus the index his search engine produced included pictures,
which students could use to put on their own Web sites; copies of notes
or research; copies of information pamphlets; movie clips that students
might have created; university brochures—basically anything that
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