I am sure that each and every one of you have wondered or argued with someone at least once about the highest mountain peek, longest river or whatever not in your country or even the world. Or perhaps you were simply looking for a pizza place nearby or the best gambling site to play at. And when that happens, who – or should I say ‘what’ is your go-to source? Everyone’s favourite search engine – Google or some of its fellow engines.

Over the years, there have been hundreds of more or less successful search engines and Walhello also falls in this category. A spider-based search engine developed in the Netherlands back in 2000, Walhello would pride itself with over 2 billion indexed pages, which is still a lot less than titans like Google and Yahoo. Nonetheless, Walhello offered even then advanced search options like:

• Proximity search – which would allow users to define the proximity (distance in characters) between two or more keywords on a given website
• Keywords sequence in search queries
• Whether or not the site should include pictures
• Language selection – nearly 50 languages
• Domain extension selection – TLD (top level domain name)
• News, shop, picture and multimedia search
• Boolean search – which would allow users to combine keywords with operators (and, not, or), to create more relevant results

So how did it work? Well, the search engine was programmed in C/C++ (I know, right??) and it ran on Linux servers. Once it would find a new website, the site’s web crawler – called the Appie spider, would automatically download the pages, thus creating a huge database. Mathematical ranking algorithms would ensure that the most relevant results were shown first. Due to the high at that time number of indexed pages, it was hard for marketers to get a visible listing on Walhello, so they created a second index, much smaller, with priority submitted pages. This meant that you could ‘buy’ your place in Walhello’s search results at a fairly small price. Sound familiar?

Another interesting search service is the knowledge technology that it had implemented. It had the purpose of offering its users more relevant results than mathematical algorithms could ever provide. The categories included famous actors, royalties, sports, music and others. And, much like today’s Google, only with fewer results, Walhello also offered an ‘Ask Questions’ section.