inverted index
Index mapping terms to the documents containing them. Enables fast text and image retrieval, underpinning search engines and bag-of-words image matching.
2 milestones
Bag of Words Applied to Computer Vision (Visual Vocabulary / Bag of Visual Words)
Josef Sivic and Andrew Zisserman at the University of Oxford applied the Bag of Words text-retrieval model to visual features in their 2003 ICCV paper 'Video Google', representing image regions as a vocabulary of visual words to enable efficient object retrieval from video.
WebCrawler Developed by Brian Pinkerton at the University of Washington
In spring 1994, Brian Pinkerton at the University of Washington deployed WebCrawler, a web search engine that used an automated crawler to index the full text of web pages, enabling users to search document content rather than titles or URLs alone.