There is an old English adage that says, “Do not look back – not even in anger”. Jonathan Fletcher, to be precise, has just followed that sermon. If you are keen on learning the whole story, then please read on.

Way back in the early nineties, long before Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two Stanford University graduate students  created Google, the fabulous set of programs known as search engine in a sun soaked California garage, Jonathan Fletcher, also a graduate student from the Sterling University had already achieved it in the wet and chilly ambience of the University’s computer laboratory. But alas, like so many other earthshaking inventions that often go unnoticed, nobody cared to give recognition to Fletcher’s groundbreaking invention.

At first, it was lack of funds, then there was dearth of disk space, but what changed the course ultimately was a lucrative job offer from Tokyo that sealed the fate of Jonathan Fletcher’s first created Search Engine.

In September this year, when Google, the multi-billion dollar company that soared so high because of its search engine, was celebrating its 15^th birthday, Fletcher, who could have taken the hot seat only if fate played a better game with him, remained totally undisturbed.

“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.

Incidentally, 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 web crawler.

As earlier said, Jonathan Fletcher never looks backward. For the last couple of decades the unpretentious Yorkshireman has served several financial institutions in Asia while raising his small family. Only very occasionally he casually mentions about his groundbreaking invention which has indirectly helped others to revolutionize the world.

Jonathan Fletcher’s background story is as stunning as what led him to invent the world’s first search engine. After graduating with a first class degree in computing and returning to Scotland in the hope of achieving a PhD in 3D graphics at the Glasgow University, he landed up as a lab technician in the University’s technology division. The unfortunate incident primarily occurred due to an unexpected cut in his funding by the authorities.

Short of money and of bare essentials, he had to sleep on floors or in the computer laboratory where he spent most of his time, resolving problems relating to information about new issues emerging on to the newly formed web.

In 1993 there were only 100 websites but the number was growing fast.  New ones had to be manually logged and entered into the What’s New page of the Mosaic browser after the site was formally registered at National Centre for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA).

“I thought there was a better way,” he says. From September until December he spent evenings and weekends when not at work toiling on the web crawler which could scan websites and index them according to aspects of their text.