...ARPANET was an incremental step from late telegraph systems <a href="en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_55-A">Plan 55</a> to the early Internet. Given the size of a typical telegram, transition from message to packet switching was more like a buzzword change. And ARPANET didn't have the end-to-end principle initially, thus functioning very much like late telegraph.

Best of class - concise, thorough. Thanks!

What about the Yanoff List? The web-based directory was a big deal in the pre-search-engine days.

Yanoff eventually begat others like The Yahoo! List and etc etc. Now get off my lawn.

Hmm... where is the first web search engine? Google definitely didn't invent web search :)

Google was important but I agree that the first search engine should have been there. IPv6 was also missed there, still not fully operational but it has been there for a while. Internet worms (i.e. Code Red) were also important, they raised some alarms related to security practices in OSs and applications.

AFAIK, Aliweb was the first search engine for the WWW and WebCrawler was the first full text search (in its original incarnation, now its only a metasearch).

They gave Gopher credit for being first in content search, although it was admittedly not exactly "web" search.