Black Internet Search Engine Moves Ahead

Search Engine Moves Ahead

ATLANTA -- When Black engineering graduate students at the Georgia Institute of Technology launched the Universal Black Pages (UBP) Web site in 1994, it broke ground as the first Black-oriented Internet search directory. The Web site represented a significant breakthrough for African American presence on the growing network, demonstrating that Blacks both wanted and had use for a place in cyberspace.

"It was the very first Black Internet search tool," says Derrick Brown, the webmaster and editor-in-chief of UBP.

The fact that graduate students established the UBP site invited comparisons between it and Yahoo!, the highly successful general Internet directory started by Stanford University students. Later, the similarities between the entities grew even more pronounced when two founding members of the UBP team established a private company to grow UBP into a profitable business just as the Yahoo founders had done with the Yahoo! Web site.

Unlike Yahoo, UBP did not become the basis for a multimillion-dollar enterprise. Instead, the Atlanta-based Internet search Web site is going back to its roots as an educational and nonprofit resource for the Black community.

Brown, who manages the Web site, has undertaken the redesign and overhaul of UBP to establish a closer link between it and KnowledgeBase Inc., a nonprofit computer education organization he launched. In the summer of 1998, Brown's KnowledgeBase organization sponsored a computer academy on the Georgia Tech campus that enrolled 75 children and adults.

This summer, Brown is expanding the summer academy in partnership with Georgia Tech and Fort Valley State University to bring the curriculum to more students. He also is introducing a Web-based entrepreneurship curriculum that will be taught to high school students attending academic camps at Fort Valley State, a historically Black institution in Georgia.

Dr. Roger Wartell, professor of biology at Georgia Tech, says the computer academy curriculum will be included in the school's annual biology summer academic camp for underrepresented minority high school students.

"It seemed like a good idea to include" this in the instructional program, Wartell says. "In biology, computers are used a great deal in the analysis of data."

The decision to fully integrate Black search directory with the operations of KnowledgeBase resulted after Brown assumed control of UBP in August 1998, following the departure of Alou Macalou, one of UBP's two founding members, from active management of the Web site. In January 1996, Larry Ward, Macalou, and Brown founded BGS Infosystems Inc. (BGSI) -- almost two years after UBP debuted on the Internet -- to establish it as a commercial Web site.

Ward and Macalou are credited with launching UBP in 1994. Macalou, Brown, and Ward had all been active in the Black Graduate Student Association at Georgia Tech.

Brown, who had served as BGSI's vice-president of strategic planning and marketing, says UBP's early success overwhelmed the management skills of its founders. By late 1998, Brown had become the sole remaining BGSI principal actively working with the UBP Web site.

"Our biggest challenge was the lack of management expertise. We were engineers trying to run a company," Brown candidly admits.

He says the toughest part of managing an Internet directory is the massive amount of labor involved with evaluating Web sites for inclusion.

"We had so many submissions," Brown says. "The only way to handle that is [by having people manually reading every submission].... You need journalists. You need writers. It's the creative people that make an Internet directory work."

Brown says another problem for BGSI was that it was unable to attract the capital needed to grow beyond its modest size. The company was profitable, but not profitable enough to finance its own expansion, according to Brown.

In addition to serving as a vice-president, Brown started KnowledgeBase as a nonprofit entity that would be linked to BGSI. As a graduate student in technology, Brown had grown committed to advocating information technology as a tool for community empowerment. Brown, who earned a master's degree in electrical engineering from Georgia Tech in 1994 and had been working on his Ph.D. when BGSI was established, says working for Black community empowerment through information technology has become his main professional focus.

Brown says the support he's getting for KnowledgeBase programs will enable him to keep UBP afloat as a viable Internet directory. He hopes to hire "literary and technical talent" to take over day-today management of the Web site so that he can devote his energies to KnowledgeBase on a full-time basis.

Visitors to the UBP Web site can still use it to:locate sites with content related to African Americans and the African Diaspora. Visitors to UBP can also learn about KnowledgeBase and read news articles describing the initiative's progress.

KnowledgeBase computer academy courses include: Introduction to the Internet; Building Web Pages; Using Internet Search Engines; How to Build a Computer; Taking Care of Your Computer; and Solving Computer Problems.

Faye Singh, program leader for Youth and Manpower Development at Fort Valley State, says the KnowledgeBase curriculum will readily fit in with the academic campS her campus sponsors each summer. Several hundred kids ranging in age from 5 to 17 spend two-week and summer-long sessions at the historically Black university, according to Singh.

According to Singh, students, who primarily come from disadvantaged and Black rural communities, have gotten minimal computer exposure in past summers. But now, she says, KnowledgeBase provides a well-defined curriculum.

The UBP Web site address is <www.ubp.com>.

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