The First Search Engine Ever Made

Browsing the internet, I have found interesting article about oldest and first search engine available to public on internet. I think this might be interesting article for you to read and learn something more about search engines and internet.

So, Which was the first functional public search engine ever created?

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.

Archie Search Engine Results Page (SERP)

Hopefully, this search engine can be accessed yet. Try it and see how it works! I have to say that’s very primitive (compared to today’s standards), but we have to take notice about the time when it was created. It was the time when only rare peoples have internet connection. Specially if we speak globally!

From this perspective, I couldn’t imagine how Google or Yahoo! (or some other search engine) would looks in ~ 20 years! What can we expect more? Because, relatively, 20 years is pretty short time! This Archie version is created 1999 – 9 years after it’s developed!

Compared to web archive files – version from 1996 is not changed (at least for appearance). Check version from 1996 and current version (lastly changed on 1999.)

So, when someone asks you or tries to convince you that some of today’s most popular search engines on the world (Google, Yahoo, Windows Live or Ask) are the oldest – proudly say it’s Archie!

Archie – Created 1990.