SKIRMISHER

Matthew Gray is creator of Wanderer, “the first autonomous agent on the web, used to track web growth since 1993″. In June 1993, there were only 130 web sites, and only two were on the .com domain. And based on Wanderer came Wandex, the first web search engine, which sounds like spandex and latex but sucked more. But at least, Gray says, it earned cookie points simply by being first.

Wanderer’s web crawling figures from 1993 to 1997 can still be seen here, and simply shows how the web literally exploded in those early halcyon days.

Now, the dude works for Google.

As he says on his site:

In the years since, I started a web analytics company, earned two degrees, joined a hardware startup, and started a wireless location company. Now, I have come full circle. In February, I started work at Google in Boston. The first month has been great and it’s a remarkable company.

Stumble it!