When the internet was just a newborn, there was a search engine and ancestor of them all steps taken to happen.

This search engine is far from gigantic algorithms and artificial intelligence Why wasn’t it successful? And was it replaced by the current giants?

The search engine’s ancestor dates back to 1990.

In the years when computers were not yet widespread and the Internet was only used for academic research and information sharing, FTP (File Transfer Protocol) servers. Searching for files was difficult. One of them got lost in long lists and spent hours looking for files.

To put an end to this chaos, a group of bright minds studying at McGill University intervened in 1990. computer science student Alan Etagehas developed a system that scans files on FTP servers.

The system made it easy to search the names of files in the database. Emtage, this project “archiver” meaning “Archie” gave his name. Thus, the first search engine in the history of the Internet was born.

How did Archie work?

Don’t think of anything like today’s complex and advanced search engines. Archie was pretty simple. It scans FTP servers on the Internet and It stored file names in the database.

But he also had his limits. It only recorded file names and provided no information about the contents. in the files because the content is not indexed Users needed to know the title of the desired file. So don’t die, my donkey, don’t die. Finding the file also required luck.

But it still provided users with more convenience than before. Instead of wasting hours by typing commands results could be achieved. Of course, it was quite primitive by today’s standards.

Why wasn’t Archie successful?

Although it gained popularity with the growth of the Internet, it was quickly overshadowed by new technologies. The Internet is developing rapidly, User needs also changed.

Archie crawled FTP servers, but did not index web pages and large text content. in 1993 With the spread of the WWW More comprehensive search engines were also needed.

The first of the systems that Archie replaces Yahoo, which debuted in 1994 happened. Names such as AltaVista and Lycos also appeared on the scene. In 1998 came Google and became the king of the search engines by changing all the rules. Thus, Archie was buried on the dusty shelves of history.

What does Emtage think about this?

The creator of Archie, one of the first explorers of the digital world, created this He couldn’t make any money because he didn’t have a patent on it. He doesn’t even feel like the forefather of search engines, but when he talks to someone he says, “I invented the search engine.” He expressed this in a statement years later.

Thank you too, Emtage.

You can also check these: