The Beginning Of Search Engines

Beginnings of Search Engines Through Archie

Once the World Wide Web (WWW) was created, and the proper technology to make search engines was introduced, search engines quickly gained popularity. In 1990, Archie, the first-ever search engine, was created at McGill University in Montreal, by Alan Emtage, a student at the university.

McGill News, Search engine pioneer inducted into Internet Hall of Fame, October 2017, Erik Leijon

Alan Emtage, founder of Archie

Archie was a way to find FTP files. Archie was unable to do many things search engines now can do so it is debated if it is one. It was closer to a list than what we have now.

Emtage chose not to patent his invention wanting this turning point in technology available to everyone.

"The reason that we didn’t patent the algorithms was largely because we did not want to strangle the baby in the crib. That was our main motivation for not patenting. We thought that if we did that, it would have a chilling effect on this new and dynamic industry."

~ Alan Emtage, November 28th, 2017, AN INTERVIEW WITH ALAN EMTAGE

Medium, Nine Search Engines We Used BEFORE Google Ruled The Internet, October 2017, Paul Walker

"You have a crawling phase, a retrieval phase where you pull the information in, and an indexing phase, where you build the data structures that allow the search, and then you have the ability to search. So, those are the three phases that Archie had"

~ Alan Emtage, November 28th, 2017, AN INTERVIEW WITH ALAN EMTAGE

An FTP stands for File Transport Protocol. For this, there is a host computer that sends files to the client computer. Using this transferring of information Archie was formed.