Monier

“From the moment I left DEC, I never used AltaVista,” says Louis Monier, who split in 1998.

In the Plex Steven Levy 2011

Kimberly Ackert designed this beautiful off-the-grid residence for the “Monier Design Competition” in Australia.

Gorgeous Modern Home is Built Inside a Cave | Inhabitat 2010

Monier figured out how to build a crawler working on that scale.

In the Plex Steven Levy 2011

Monier himself was no expert in information retrieval but a big fan of data in the abstract.

In the Plex Steven Levy 2011

“Crawling at that time was slow, because the other side would take on average four seconds to respond,” says Monier.

In the Plex Steven Levy 2011

Monier was most concerned with the second step, the time-consuming process of crawling through millions of documents and scooping up the data.

In the Plex Steven Levy 2011

“DEC was very much living in the past,” says Monier.

In the Plex Steven Levy 2011

“The big ones then had maybe a million pages,” says Monier.

In the Plex Steven Levy 2011

They argued that there was no way to make money from a search engine but relented when Monier sold them on the public relations aspect.

In the Plex Steven Levy 2011

A key designer was Louis Monier, a droll Frenchman and idealistic geek who had come to America with a doctorate in 1980.

In the Plex Steven Levy 2011