It was developed in September 1993 by Oliver McBryan at the University of Colorado as a research project.
The worm created a database of 300,000 multimedia objects which could be obtained or searched for keywords via the WWW.
[2] In contrast to present-day search engines, the WWWW featured support for Perl regular expressions.
McBryan stated in a 2016 podcast that WWWW was an educational project and he never thought of commercializing it like Excite or Yahoo!
did, partly because the University did not have a department that dealt specifically with such computer technology.