What was SUPARS? Antecdent of Today's Search Explained
What was SUPARS? Antecdent of Today's Search Explained
August 2023
Where and How Did Online Search Begin?
A brief article from the AEON site provides a quick look back in time to work conducted by the Syracuse University School of Library Science. Pauline Atherton Cochrane and her colleague, Jeffrey Katzer, launched the project as an early investigation of how users approached information retrieval in an online environment.
The SUPARS team had no way of knowing that AI-powered web-search algorithms would be doing this precise work a few decades later, but they clearly had a sense that this would be a new and effective way of continually updating search results.
