Archie was the first internet search engine, created in 1990 to search FTP archives.
Archie was developed at McGill University by Alan Emtage, Peter Deutsch, and Bill Heelan. It collected listings of files available on anonymous File Transfer Protocol servers and allowed users to search those filenames. It did not index the contents of web pages because the World Wide Web had not yet become widely available.
The name Archie is commonly described as a shortened form of “archives,” not a reference to the comic-book character. Users originally accessed the service through command-line clients, email, or later web interfaces.
Archie is often confused with the first web search engines, such as WebCrawler or Lycos. Those services searched web pages, whereas Archie focused on files hosted on FTP servers. Its approach established an important early pattern: automatically gathering network information into a searchable index.