  Today, we tend to associate search engines with computer technology, and perhaps more specifically with Internet-based computing and electronic devices. Yet, the early work in search/information retrieval systems was carried out independently of developments in electronic computing. Whereas the first (general purpose) electronic computer—the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer)—was completed in November 1945 and announced in February 1946 (Palfreman and Swade, 1991), several decades would pass before Internet search engines became available. Because ENIAC and other early computers were designed primarily to “crunch numbers,” relatively little thought had been given to the kinds of information-retrieval systems that could be used to search through the large amount of data that those non-networked (or “stand-alone”) computers were capable of storing. However, some information-retrieval theorists, as we shall see, had already begun to worry about the amount of information that was becoming available during this period and that, in all likelihood, would proliferate with the advent of computers. In particular, they were concerned about how an ever-expanding repository of information could be organized and retrieved in a practical way.  Halavais (2009, 13) notes that early computers “drew on the ideas of librarians and filing clerks” for arranging the stored information that would be retrieved. But some of the leading thinkers in the emerging field of information retrieval (or IR), which Van Couvering (2008) describes as a “hybrid” academic discipline combining elements of information science and computer science, saw that traditional methods for retrieving information would not be effective in the era of electronic computer systems.