What do you do when you need to find something on the Internet? In most cases, you pop over to one of the major search engines and type in the term or phrase that youâre looking for and then click through the results, right? But of course search engines werenât always around. In its infancy, the Internet wasnât what you think of when you use it now. In fact, it was nothing like the web of interconnected sites thatâs become one of the greatest business facilitators of our time. Instead, what was called the Internet was actually a collection of FTP (File Transfer Protocol) sites that users could access to download (or upload) files. To find a specific file in that collection, users had to navigate through each file. Sure, there were shortcuts. If you knew the right people â that would be the people who knew the exact address of the file you were looking for â you could go straight to the file. Thatâs assuming you knew exactly what you were looking for. The whole process made finding files on the Internet a difficult, timeconsuming exercise in patience. But that was before a student at McGill University in Montreal decided there had to be an easier way. In 1990, Alan Emtage created the first search tool used on the Internet. His creation, an index of files on the Internet, was called Archie. If youâre thinking Archie, the comic book character created in 1941, youâre a little off track (at least for now). The name Archie was used because the file name Archives was too long. Later, Archieâs pals from the comic book series (Veronica and Jughead) came onto the search scene, too, but weâll get to that shortly.
Archie wasnât actually a search engine like those that you use today. But at the time, it was a program many Internet users were happy to have. The program basically downloaded directory listings for all of the files that were stored on anonymous FTP sites in a given network of computers. Those listings were then plugged into a searchable database of web sites. The search capabilities of Archie werenât as fancy as the natural language capabilities youâll find in most common search engines today, but at the time it got the job done. Archie indexed computer files, making them easier to locate. In 1991, however, another student named Mark McCahill, at the University of Minnesota, decided that if you could search for files on the Internet, then surely you could also search plain text for specific references in the files. Because no such application existed, he created Gopher, a program that indexed the plain-text documents that later became the first web sites on the public Internet. With the creation of Gopher, there also needed to be programs that could find references within the indexes that Gopher created, and so Archieâs pals finally rejoined him. Veronica (Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index to Computerized Archives) and Jughead (Jonzyâs Universal Gopher Hierarchy Excavation and Display) were created to search the files that were stored in the Gopher Index System. Both of these programs worked in essentially the same way, allowing users to search the indexed information by keyword.
Archie wasnât actually a search engine like those that you use today. But at the time, it was a program many Internet users were happy to have. The program basically downloaded directory listings for all of the files that were stored on anonymous FTP sites in a given network of computers. Those listings were then plugged into a searchable database of web sites. The search capabilities of Archie werenât as fancy as the natural language capabilities youâll find in most common search engines today, but at the time it got the job done. Archie indexed computer files, making them easier to locate. In 1991, however, another student named Mark McCahill, at the University of Minnesota, decided that if you could search for files on the Internet, then surely you could also search plain text for specific references in the files. Because no such application existed, he created Gopher, a program that indexed the plain-text documents that later became the first web sites on the public Internet. With the creation of Gopher, there also needed to be programs that could find references within the indexes that Gopher created, and so Archieâs pals finally rejoined him. Veronica (Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index to Computerized Archives) and Jughead (Jonzyâs Universal Gopher Hierarchy Excavation and Display) were created to search the files that were stored in the Gopher Index System. Both of these programs worked in essentially the same way, allowing users to search the indexed information by keyword.
