Q 01/05

In May 2025, roughly what share of worldwide search did Google hold, according to StatCounter?

A) About 90%

B) About 93%

C) About 96%

D) About 98%

Answer · why

A) About 90%

That month was the first time in over a decade it had dipped below 90%; Bing was second on about 4%.

Q 02/05

What did Vannevar Bush call his hypothetical desk-sized information machine of 1945, a forerunner of hypertext?

A) the difference engine

B) the memex

C) the knowbot

D) the hyperdesk

Answer · why

B) the memex

The idea appeared in his Atlantic Monthly essay 'As We May Think'.

Q 03/05

What was the first well-documented search engine, which indexed public FTP sites from September 1990, called?

A) Gopher

B) Veronica

C) Archie

D) Wandex

Answer · why

C) Archie

The name is simply 'archive' without the v; it was written by Alan Emtage at McGill University in Montreal.

Q 04/05

The Gopher search tools Veronica and Jughead were named as a nod to which comic-book series?

A) Peanuts

B) Tintin

C) Dick Tracy

D) Archie

Answer · why

D) Archie

The earlier FTP engine had not been named after the comics, but its successors deliberately completed the joke.

Q 05/05

Before September 1993, how was the entire World Wide Web indexed?

A) By hand

B) By a CERN crawler

C) By university mainframes

D) By Usenet volunteers' scripts

Answer · why

A) By hand

Tim Berners-Lee edited a list of web servers hosted at CERN; NCSA announced new servers under 'What's New!'.