As millennials, we are addicted to Google. We ask it for directions when we are travelling, we ask it to dub as our personal cookbook queen when we want to prepare a scrumptious meal for our loved ones, we seek its help in finding a new job, we even seek its counsel for curing our broken hearts. The entire world today is ‘powered’ by Google. It’s like a pandora box, which holds limitless knowledge.
But do you know Google wasn’t the world first search engine?
For many, this might come as a piece of news as shocking as the fall of the Berlin wall, but it’s true. Infact, Google didn’t come into existing till 1996, when Larry Page and Sergey Brin started working on developing a search engine as their research project for PhD at Stanford University.
The history of search engine dates back to 1990 when world’s first search engine Archie (short form for ‘archive’) was developed by Alan Emtage and Peter Deutsch, who were postgraduate students at McGill University in Montreal, United States, and Bill Heelan, who worked at the McGill University.
The earliest version of Archie used File Transfer Protocol (FTP) to inquire the names of files that were listed on its servers. Unlike the present time, whenever a new FTP server came online, it had to be listed on the servers of the search engines for the users to be able to find information. Archie’s servers had a list of all files on the public FTP servers and the users could search for information using the file name.
Interestingly, you can still search for information on Archie. This is how it’s web page looks like:
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Archie search engine (Photo: Archie grab)
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Following the phenomenal success of Archie, Veronica and Jughead were introduced in 1991. While Archie was not named after the popular comic-book character Archie, Veronica and Jughead were named after the characters from the popular comic series.
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