Google's history search is IBM's WBI, ten years later

IRONICALLY Google's latest "innovation" of letting you search through your own browsing history is nothing new, IBM did something similar ten years ago. Predictably, IBM management failed to promote the idea.

Ten years ago, IBMers at the firm's Almaden research labs created WBI or "web browser intelligence", an intermediate "proxy" application that was available in OS/2 and Windows flavours, and ran in your PC, alongside your browser, storing the URL of every web page your loaded, giving the user a visual "tree" representation of past browsing sessions and also allowing you to search your browsing history. It was a nice product and worked well. The only problem was the slowness of PCs at the time and that searching got slower and slower the bigger your "search history" database got.

Predictably, the software "morphed into middleware" and disappeared from the end-user market -typical of IBM's top management without a clue-. In a sense, what Google has "invented" now with Google history is what IBMers at Almaden did with WBI, but run on the "server side" rather than locally. Ironically, IBM now lists WBI as some of its "research technologies" available for "licensing". In other words they have the old pile of junk and don't know what to do with it. Much later, Netscape's v6.0 browser and its sibling Mozilla made popular the "history" tab in the browser's sidebar that did almost the same, but in a more limited fashion.

So what used to be a separate application a decade ago in IBM's vision now works on the "server side" at Google's mothership. Isn't it amazing how Big Blue managed to #### [insert your favourite four letter expletive here] their chances every time?. µ

L'INQs
1997: IBM unveils WBI intelligent agent
IBM WBI OS/2 announcement
The Unofficial WBI story