What was the First Search Engine?
The first few hundred web sites began in 1993 and most of them were at colleges, but long before most of them existed came Archie. The first search engine created was Archie, created in 1990 by Alan Emtage, a student at McGill University in Montreal. The original intent of the name was “archives,” but it was shortened to Archie. Archie helped solve this data scatter problem by combining a script-based data gatherer with a regular expression matcher for retrieving file names matching a user query. Essentially Archie became a database of web filenames which it would match with the users queries. Bill Slawski has more background on Archie at http://www.seobythesea.com/?p=106 Sources: http://www.search-marketing.
A search engine is a computer program that acts as a way of retrieving information from a database, based on certain criteria defined by the user. Modern search engines search databases that contain huge amounts of data, collected from the World Wide Web, newsgroups, and directory projects. The evolution of the search engine was rather quick, with the earliest true search engine appearing at the beginning of the 1990s, and the first modern-style search engine appearing in 1995. Before the World Wide Web existed, but after the advent of the Internet and its ensuing popularity in the university circuit, the first search engine was created. At this point in history — in the late 1980s and early 1990s — one of the main protocols being used on the Internet was the file transfer protocol (FTP). FTP servers existed throughout the world, usually on university campuses, research facilities, or government agencies. Some students at McGill University in Montreal decided that a centralized databas
Some recent research I’ve been doing had me looking at the Infoseek search engine, and its part in the history of search engines. I remembered an old book I have on search engines which has a couple of chapters on Infoseek, and started to reread it. The book is the Web Developer.com Guide to Search Engines, from February of 1998. It’s been a while since I’ve picked up a book about search engines which hasn’t mentioned Google. This one focuses upon the search engines on the web at that time, and on adding a search feature to your site. I didn’t get much past the first section of the first chapter of the book, titled Bow Down and Give Thanks to Archie, before I hopped on the web and started looking at Archie’s role on the net. As it notes there: The grandfather of all search engines was Archie, created in 1990 by Alan Emtage, a student at McGill University in Montreal. While the chapter gives credit to Archie as the first search engine, it really doesn’t go into too much detail about wha
