“SciDex… Killer name.”

Everyone in 1998 who heard I’d bought a website

SciDex was the first domain name I ever purchased. My goal with SciDex had been to create an index on the web of all scientific information.

Back in the ’90s, portals were all the rage. Collecting information into clickable lists was about the the greatest service you could provide, as no one knew at that time how to find anything of use on the web. Whole books were published containing nothing but links to fun sites. Yeah, you read that right. Books of links, like dictionaries. How quaint.

But then Alta Vista arrived, and after that Yahoo, then finally Google. Each of those sites was better than the other at helping people search for what they wanted to know. 

Although I knew how to create databases and had a firm grasp of HTML and Classic ASP, I was never able to collate the vast amounts of data nor create a page crawler on the same scale of the big three search engines. So SciDex is now just a bit of my personal internet history. Perhaps one day I will find a way make use of the site.

After all, it is a killer name.