Bangalore: The World’s first search engine, a multimillion dollar business was conceived and implemented with the name ‘Archie’ in 1989. The person behind it was Alan Emtage (a student of McGill University in Montreal), who now seems to have no regrets on missing the chance to make his product another “Google”. According to him at that time, no one made money out of the internet and he didn’t patent any of the original ideas behind Archie.

So if one wonders how Archie really worked; it is not like other search engines of today. Though it allowed users to look around the internet, it didn’t index the content of text files. This capability came in 1991 after Gopher, a search tool was developed.

According to the book, “The Daemon, the GNU and the Penguin – A History of Free and Open Source,” in 1992 Archie contained about 2.6 million files with 150 gigabytes of information. But gradually after 1993, Archie was pretty strained in handling search engine issues. According to a research paper called Research Problems for Scalable Internet Resource Discovery, the overall world wide collection of queries numbered up to 50,000, generated by a few thousand visitors worldwide.

Also every month or two of internet growth required another replica of Archie. A dozen Archie servers replicate a continuous 150 MB database of 2.1 million records. While the search engine took a few seconds on Saturday nights, it took around five minutes to several hours for results on weekday afternoons.

But the World Wide Web changed a lot of things. There was one early method of indexing the web called ALIWEB (Archie-Like Indexing in the Web) that was created by Martijn Koster, one of the chief architects of Standards for Robots Exclusion. But ALIWEB did not take off the way other search engines; it was just Koster’s work on Robots that became a part of the future search engines’ growth.

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