Archie: The Humble Beginnings of Internet Search

In a world before Google…

Today, search engines are an indispensable part of navigating and finding information on the internet.

Hard to believe that it's only been a little more than a couple of decades with Google and co.

With the ability to instantly search billions of webpages, modern search engines like provide tremendous utility for internet users.

This was not always the case. Before the rise of search technology, information online was largely decentralized and difficult to discover efficiently.

This changed with Archie, the pioneering first search engine created in 1990 that evolved how people accessed content on the early internet.

The internet before search engines

In the 1980s and early 1990s, the internet was still in its infancy.

While networks and protocols like TCP/IP and FTP allowed computers to interconnect, the World Wide Web had not yet been fully developed.

Most online activity centered around FTP sites, which allowed users to access and download files.

FTP sites were run by universities, companies…