Pandia celebrates its 10 year anniversary. Here is the strange story about how Pandia was born out of an act of the Norwegian parliament.

By Per Koch, co-editor of Pandia

In Web time Pandia is ancient.

It was born in December 1998, a couple of months after Google was incorporated. At that time AltaVista was the best search engine around, and a large number of search engine companies competed for the number 1 spot.

Remember Infoseek, Hotbot, and Excite? They were all listed on the Pandia home page of early 1999.

Although a lot of our visitors believed Pandia was yet another American corporation trying to conquer its part of the growing search engine market, it was in fact a hobby site run by two Norwegians: My wife Susanne and myself.

All-in-one link collection

Pandia started out as an all-in-one link and search form collection, gathering a large number of relevant search tools in one place. It was this home page that later was turned into
Pandia Powersearch, your one stop shop for Internet search fixes.

In 1999 we added the Goalgetter web search tutorial, which ended up on the curricula of several American universities.

We also put up a version of the Open Directory, proving that even a historian of ideas (Per) and a theologian (Susanne) could set up their own search tool, provided they had access to the relevant scripts and patience enough to learn some basic UNIX.

In 2001 we even got our own metasearch engine.

By that time we also had search engine news on our home page. We were blogging, although we did not yet call it a blog.

So. what’s this about the Norwegian parliament?

In 1991, fresh out of the university, I started working in the Norwegian Ministry of Education, Research and Church Affairs. I was working on science and technology policy, and was soon involved in writing speeches for the Minister, Professor Gudmund Hernes, one of Norway’s leading sociologists.

Hernes was member of Gro Harlem Brundtland’s cabinet. Some of you may remember her as leader of the Brundland Commission and the WHO.

In Norway the public sector was far ahead of industry in using Internet. I can remember telling Susanne enthusiastically about finding Gopher on my PC, a program that let me access files on servers in the US! Wow! I had seen the future and it worked!

I even had an email address, although there was only a couple of people I could actually write too. That was about to change — quickly!

Schola

Gudmund Hernes felt that Norway lacked a high quality magazine that was able to present science, culture, politics and public debate in a coherent and popular manner. There was no Norwegian equivalent to Time, The Economist or Le Monde. He decided that the Ministry would publish an informative magazine targeting schools and teachers.

He appointed Ingrid Yrvin as editor of the new magazine in 1993, and asked me to become a member of the editorial board.

I remember discussing the World Wide Web with Ingrid, arguing that we should put up a Schola guide to educational resources on the Internet. She was a bit skeptical at first, but soon warmed up to the idea.

The people running the government web site were harder to convince, however. They found it highly problematic to link out to sites not owned by the government. Such links could be interpreted as public endorsements of those sites, they argued, meaning the minister could get in trouble for what these sites wrote!

Yes, you can safely say that they had not fully comprehended the nature of the World Wide Web. However, since we had the minister on our side, we did get permission to add a Schola subsite to the Ministry’s web site, and Edderkoppen (”The Spider”) a column on online resources for teachers and students was born.

Edderkoppen contained information about search and search engines as well, and was probably the first of its kind in Norway.

The opposition in Parliament was slightly annoyed at Hernes, who was one of the most proactive and reform oriented ministers of education and research in Norwegian history. One way of keeping him in check was through the Parliamentary control of the budget. They cut the funding of Schola in 1996, and that was the end of the magazine. At that time Hernes had become a Minister of Health instead, and there was nothing he could do about it.

(When the opposition took over in 1997, the new minister of education and research, the late Jon Lilletun - another great politician — told me in 1999 that he regretted that they had closed down Schola. It had all been part of the political game, he said.)

Edderkoppen becomes Pandia

I had actually coded the Schola web site by hand using a simple text editor, and by this time both Susanne and I knew HTML.

We had also learned a lot about the web, directories and search engines, and decided that we could use this knowledge as the foundation for a new and interesting hobby.

So we hired some server space from an Indian company in New York (!) and put up our new site on search and search engines.

Even at that time the most relevant domain names were taken, and we decided to name the site after Pandia (or Pandea), a Greek goddess for light and enlightenment.

So, that’s the story about how the Norwegian “Storting” caused the birth of Pandia!

Retracing Edderkoppen

The Schola site no longer exists, but the Wayback Machine has a copy of the Edderkoppen column.

Edderkoppen had a separate page covering search tools.

This page was organized into several categories:

• “Temakataloger” (directories) like Yahoo!, Lycos, Magellan, and GNN Best of the net.
• “Søkeprogrammer” (search engines) like Infoseek, Webcrawler, AltaVista, Excite and Hotbot. Google did not exist at the time.
• “Metasøkere” (metasearch engines) like Metacrawler, SavvySearch, and Internet Sleuth.
• “Norske temakataloger” (Norwegian directories) like Kvasir and Telenor’s Origo/Index.
• “Utenfor World Wide Web” (outside the web), like Archie for FTP, Veronica for Gopher and Deja News for Usenet.
• “Epostadresser”, i.e. search tools for finding email addresses, like Four11 directory and BigFoot.

Most of these services are now history, but — hey! — Pandia remains…

See also the Pandia history line.