Now that we have a grasp on what a search engine is and what it does, let us travel back in time to the very first tool created to search the Internet. This tool was named Archie, which stands for 'archive' minus the 'v.' It was created by a student named Alan Emtage in 1990. This program went out on the Internet and downloaded the directories of all the files located on public File Transfer Protocol or FTP sites and created a searchable database of filenames.

The next step in search engines was created in 1991 by Mark McCahill and was named the Gopher, after the small rodent that burrows and digs through the dirt and the University of Minnesota's mascot. Gopher, unlike Archie, indexed plain text documents and since Gopher created text files, the Gopher sites were easily converted to Web sites when the World Wide Web was created.

Once Gopher was generally accepted as a viable search option, other programs such as 'Veronica' and 'Jughead' were developed to search the index files that Gopher created. Veronica is an acronym for 'Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index to Computerized Archives' and provided a keyword search of Gopher's menu titles. Jonzy's Universal Gopher Hierarchy Excavation And Display or Jughead for short obtained Gopher menu information from various servers.

The first true search engine, now defunct, was named Wandex and was developed in 1993 by Matthew Gray. Another search engine that also appeared in 1993, and is working today, is called Aliweb. Webcrawler was the first crawler based search engine and came out in 1994. It differed from the previous engines by allowing users to search for any word in ANY web page. Lycos was also released in 1994 and quickly became a major commercial enterprise.

Once the commercial market realized there was money to be made many search engines appeared and fought for popularity. Some of them still exist today, they are: Excite, Infoseek, Inktomi, and AltaVista.  These companies competed with directories such as Yahoo in many ways causing directories to add on search engine technology to offer greater functionality.

So hopefully now you have a grasp of what a search engine is, how it works, and the history of its development. Most of us today that use the Web probably take this for granted but let me assure you that before search engines existed finding data was nearly impossible. I remember punch cards and mainframes long before search engines were even thought of.