First Search Engine

UK Search Engines - The First Search Engine

The worlds first Search Engine was created in 1990 by McGill University student Alan Emtage. He named the search engine 'Archie', short for Archives due to the limitation of filenames in Unix systems.

Before Archie, users shared files and data using an FTP server (File Transfer Protocol). This worked when sharing between small groups of users but as the number of users increased by reluctance to share information with other users.

Archie solved this problem as it was a database of web filenames which matched the queries of users. Archie paved the way for another search engine, 'Veronica'. This was developed in 1993 by the Nevada System Computing Services Group. Veronica served the same purpose as Archie, but only worked on plain text files.

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