How Search Was Born: From Archie to Google
Before Google, finding something online meant knowing where it was. Here is how the web learned to search itself.
By the InterStalgia history desk · November 14, 2026
In the early internet, if you wanted a file, you had to know which computer it lived on. There was no search box. The first tools to fix that were built by students, and most of them had funny names.
Archie, 1990
Alan Emtage, a graduate student at McGill University in Montreal, wrote Archie in 1990. It wasn't a web search engine, because there was barely a web. Archie indexed the files on public FTP servers so you could look up a filename and find out where to download it. It is considered the first internet search engine.
Directories, 1994
In January 1994, Stanford graduate students Jerry Yang and David Filo made a web page called "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web," a list of sites they liked, sorted into categories. They renamed it Yahoo, a name that has been explained as standing for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle." Yahoo was a directory, not a search engine: people chose and sorted the sites by hand. For a web of a few thousand sites, that worked surprisingly well.
Crawlers, 1994 and 1995
As the web grew, people started writing programs to read it automatically. Brian Pinkerton began work on WebCrawler at the University of Washington on January 27, 1994. It was the first web search engine to search the full text of pages, not just their titles. In May 1994, Michael Mauldin started Lycos as a research project at Carnegie Mellon University.
On December 15, 1995, AltaVista launched. Researchers at Digital Equipment Corporation built it partly to show off how fast the company's computers were, and it was fast. It was sold to Overture in February 2003 for $140 million, became part of Yahoo the same year, and in 2013 the domain was pointed at Yahoo Search.
BackRub
The problem with early search engines was ranking. They could find every page that mentioned your words, but they couldn't tell which pages were any good. In 1996 two Stanford students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, built a search project called BackRub that looked at the links between pages. Their PageRank algorithm treated a link as a kind of vote: a page that many important pages linked to was probably important itself.
They registered google.com on September 15, 1997. The name came from a misspelling of "googol," the number 1 followed by a hundred zeros. On September 4, 1998, they incorporated Google in a friend's garage in Menlo Park, California. The friend was Susan Wojcicki, who later ran YouTube.
By the time the dot-com bubble burst, Google's plain white page with a single search box had won. The directories, the portals and most of the early crawlers faded away. Archie was there first, though.