4. Person: Brian Pinkerton

    Innovation: WebCrawler

To find anything back when the World Wide Web had just started growing was a mammoth task… until the birth of WebCrawler. WebCrawler was the Internet’s first "full-text" search engine. It enabled a search among a specific set of keywords from its index of 4,000+ pages and set a standard that is still the rule of thumb for search engines today.

Brian Pinkerton, a University of Washington student, launched WebCrawler in April 1994 as a project he would work on in his free time. By November, his little tool yielded its 1 millionth search result (“nuclear weapons design and research”). A little more than a year later, AOL acquired it and sold it to Excite, and it was then taken up by InfoSpace in 2001.

It thrives even today as a meta-search engine that combines results from Google, Yahoo and Bing… as is Mr Pinkerton himself—he’s worked at a variety of companies,since the closing of Excite in 2003, as a search engine expert, including the most recent lending of his services at A9 as the chief architect of search. A9 is the company that helps you find things on Amazon.com.