Before the arrival of the search engine, computers were linked together simply to let people transfer files between themselves. Those who had files to share set up a server, and those who wanted the files would come and get them. In time these servers clumped together, and having lots of files in one place made them easier to find. But even with clumping, files were spread out over the Internet. If you did not know the location of a file, it was very hard to track it down.
This was the problem facing Alan Emtage (b. 1964), studying at McGill University in Montreal. With funding for software limited, it was Emtage's job to find free applications on the Internet for the university to use. At first he searched by hand, building a database of the software he had found, but eventually, being a computer scientist, he made a program to do the job.
In 1990 the first search engine was born. Emtage's program was built to archive, but the UNIX world standard for program names required them to be short and cryptic, so he dropped the "v" in "archive' and named the program "Archie." The software was a long way from modern search engines, but if you knew the name of the file you wanted, it could help you find it, which was a massive leap forward.
Archie searched file names, but in 1991, Gopher was created—this could search the text contained within files. Search engines then began to use statistics to aid the search. Yahoo added descriptions of pages and Lycos analyzed the closeness of words and gave you sites by relevance. By 1995, AltaVista had appeared, additionally capable of searching for pictures, music, and videos.
