Alkaline was originally developed by Daniel Doubrovkine, at that time, student at the University of Geneva, founder of Vestris Inc., Switzerland. The author was faced the particular problem of installing a working search engine to the Swiss French TV website. All existing search engines failed to perform according to the customer's requirements.
Alkaline was born. It was rather slow but sufficient. Improvements were made on a daily basis and a new C++ base library was designed as the evolution of the MV4 C++ library originally used for Alkaline. It exposed strings and arrays, implemented the full HTTP/1.0 stack, threads, URLs, parsers, had a portable file system abstraction and many more facilities. Designed from scratch, it was consistently tested across various NT and UNIX systems. Alkaline 1.0 was able to spider properly but had rather poor indexing and search performance.
While working on an unrelated project, Hassan Sultan, also a student at the University of Geneva came up with an idea to build efficient cross-reference tables and navigate through the cells matrix with an O(n) complexity without any of the parallel processing techniques. This algorithm, called the cellular expansion algorithm was implemented in Alkaline 1.1. The search engine was slowly growing from a private lab project into a full scale commercial search engine.
Today, Alkaline is version 1.9. It is a strong search engine machine running on hundreds of web sites around the world.