What is the name of the first internet search engine?

The first internet search engine was Archie.

Created in 1990 by Alan Emtage at McGill University, Archie indexed file listings from anonymous FTP servers. It let users search for filenames across networked archives at a time when the World Wide Web did not yet exist. The name came from “archive” with the “v” removed, not from the Archie comic character.

Archie was not like Google: it searched filenames and directory listings rather than the text inside web pages. Users typically searched for a known file, then downloaded it through FTP. Gopher search tools such as Veronica and Jughead followed, while web search engines became important after the Web expanded in the mid-1990s.

AltaVista and WebCrawler were later web search engines, so they are not candidates for the first internet search engine. Archie’s historical importance comes from pioneering searchable indexes of internet-hosted content before modern web search existed.