Robby, stylized as RoBBy, was the first Greek search engine conceived in the summer of 1997.
Operating from the domain name Robby.gr, it aimed at providing its visitors with accurate information from the Greek cyberspace. RoBBy launched on November 10, 1997 having crawled a small part of the Greek web.
Mere months later, in February 1998, Robby had stored more than 50,000 unique URLs at a rate of more than 500 per day.
RoBBy also provided directory services, having structured these crawled URLs from the Greek cyberspace into themed categories, just as the early Yahoo did. It was possible, for example, to request a list of all travel agencies in Greece.
A secondary crawler would then revisit these stored pages at timed intervals, looking for changes or updates. A manual URL submission and approval service was also part of the RoBBy search engine.
RoBBy was the brainchild of Aquanet founder, Lefteris Xanthoudakis, a developer from Greece. A self-taught programmer as a teenager, Mr. Xanthoudakis went on to study the first Greek search engine & directory service; we’re proud to have provided consulting services at the time.
RoBBy appears to have remained live and active well past the late 2010s, eventually shutting down around 2023 when the domain dropped.
