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Year: 1990​

Who: Alan Emtage​

Where: McGill University, Montreal, Canada

What: Before you could “just Google it,” finding information online was a tedious and time-consuming process. The concept of easily searching for data on the internet didn’t exist—until Alan Emtage, a visionary from Barbados, revolutionized how we access information by creating the world’s first search engine, Archie, in 1989.

At the time, Emtage was a graduate student and systems administrator at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. His job required him to manually search through various File Transfer Protocol (FTP) servers to locate software that could be useful for students and faculty. Frustrated by this labor-intensive process and the university’s slow internet connection, Emtage designed Archie to automate the task. His innovation worked by indexing files on public FTP servers and creating a searchable database, making it much easier to locate files.

Archie, named after “archive” (minus the “v”), was a game-changer. It streamlined information retrieval at a time when the internet was still in its infancy, with limited users and infrastructure. Despite its groundbreaking nature, Emtage saw no need to patent Archie. In his own words, “[The internet] wasn’t a commercial entity. Nobody was making any money off the Internet. We were fighting the good fight.”

Unpatented, Emtage’s innovation laid the foundation for modern search engines like Google, which now serve billions of users worldwide. Although he doesn’t profit from his invention, Emtage takes pride in its lasting impact, often humorously reflecting, “Every now and again, I interact with somebody who’s a real idiot, and I think to myself, ‘Yeah, but you know what? I invented the search engine.’”

Today, Emtage’s pioneering work is recognized as the ancestor of every search engine we use, an essential tool in the digital age, connecting billions of people to an infinite world of knowledge.

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