JONATHON Fletcher does not look backwards. For the past two decades the unassuming Yorkshireman has worked in the financial services industry in Asia, raising his family and only occasionally telling friends and colleagues of his extraordinary invention which has helped revolutionise the world. Back in the early 1990s, five years before Larry Page and Sergey Brin created their globe-conquering behemoth Google on a sun-drenched California campus, Mr Fletcher was a hard-up graduate student perfecting in the chillier climes of a Stirling University computer laboratory what has now come to be seen as the first recognisable web search engine. But a shortage of funding, a lack of available disk space and a job offer to Tokyo saw him abandon his creation JumpStation and the vast riches it might have brought. Speaking from Hong Kong in the week that Google - a company now valued at $400bn - celebrated its 15th birthday Mr Fletcher is remarkably relaxed about the hand that fate has dealt him. "Looking back is a little bit artificial. You do things in the present or looking forward. Looking back - knowing what I know about the search engine industry - I guess you could say it would have been nice if things had turned out differently. But at the time I just did what I wanted to do and it was the right thing at the time. That is how things work out," he says. The 43-year-old father of two, who got his first ZX81 computer as a schoolboy growing up in Scarborough in 1981 is being hailed as the father of the search engine for his innovative webcrawler. The device - still at the heart of Google, Bing and Yahoo! - is able to sift through webpages and create an effective index making it possible to find things among the ever growing avalanche of data in cyberspace.
Posted on: Tue, 10 Sep 2013 06:19:51 +0000
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