Bajan Alan Emtage in 1989, aged 25, invented the first internet search engine – Achie (Archive without the v).  At the time he was a post graduate student at McGill University working as a volunteer systems administrator for the School of Computer Science where he conceived and implemented: Archie, a pre-web internet search engine for locating material in public FTP archives.

Archie is widely considered to be the world’s first Internet search engine.

Archie (Archive without a v) – Alan Emtage’s ftp search engine from 1989

Alan says: “I wrote a piece of code that gave birth to a multi-billion dollar industry”.  In recognition of this in 2017 Alan was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame.

Lets go back to 1989.  At that time, there was an internet, but not yet a way to search what was out there.  There was no Google!

Everything was done by using command line tools.  The ability to search this awesome new world of the internet became a game changer.

Archie was designed to provide an online index of public FTP (file transfer protocol) sites, the internet information repositories that existed before the web and home pages.

Before Archie, the only way people could find out the existence of an FTP server was by word-of-mouth or to be sent an e-mail telling where to find the information.

By 1992, Archie had catalogued over 200 public FTP sites. It is a figure that seems almost laughable by today’s standards, but back then was already beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. At its peak in 1995, 30 Archie engines crawled the Internet and had catalogued millions of pages.

While FTP continues to be a common way to share files over the Internet, Archie is no longer used.

Click on the link below so see Alan Emtage’s acceptance speech on being inducted into the the internet hall of fame in 2017:

Click on the link below so listen to an audio interview between Tyler Reed of Vault Solution LLC and Alan Emtage:

For further background information on Alan Emtage and Archie see: