Finding stuff online: 20 years of innovative search engines

What would the Internet be without a way to find something specific on its millions of sites? Search engines started providing that function two decades ago. Here are some of the landmarks, from Archie to AltaVista to Google and Bing.

Archie Arrives (September 10, 1990)



Alan Emtage, Bill Heelan, and J. Peter Deutsch wrote Archie (short for "archive") in 1990 while attending Montreal's McGill University. In the era before the World Wide Web, Archie served as a search engine for FTP sites around the globe.

In its early days, users accessed it through Telnet sessions like that captured at left. Later, users could search Archie through Gopher and Web gateways, though more-versatile search tools soon surpassed the service.

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