If someone told you that someone from the Caribbean invented the world’s first internet search engine, would you believe them?
- Every Time We Use A Search Engine We Should Remember Alam Emtage:The Father of Search Engine
- He conceived of and implemented Archie, the world’s first Internet search engine, pioneering many techniques used by all search engines
- Alan Emtage was inducted in the 2017 Internet Hall of Fame for his work in the field of innovation
Well it turns out that Alan Emtage, from Barbados, conceived of and implemented Archie, the world’s first Internet search engine, pioneering many techniques used by all search engines.
In 1989, Emtage was a graduate student at McGill University in Montreal, where he’d moved from his native Barbados. As a systems administrator in the university’s information technology department, it was his job to find software for students and faculty members—which at that time involved manually digging around the various FTP (File Transfer Protocol) servers scattered across the nascent internet. To save his own time, he wrote some code that would do the searching for him, and named his FTP search engine “ARCHIE” (after “archive”, without the “v”.)
Alan Emtage was inducted in the 2017 Internet Hall of Fame for his work in the field of innovation. This makes Emtage the first person from the Caribbean to receive this award.
Here is Emtage giving his acceptance speech.
Next time you use Google or Bing, remember the man who made it possible, Alan Emtage, a Barbadian.
