The first Internet search engine, created in 1990, was Archie. It was developed by Alan Emtage, a computer science student and systems administrator at McGill University in Montreal.
Archie searched file listings on public anonymous FTP servers. It did not crawl and understand the contents of web pages in the modern sense; instead, it collected directory information and made filenames searchable. That made it much easier to locate downloadable files across the early Internet.
Archie’s name was derived from “archive” with the “v” removed, not from the Archie comic-book character. The later Gopher search tools Veronica and Jughead used names from that comic series, which is why those choices can seem plausible. Archie predates the World Wide Web’s public growth and was eventually superseded by web search engines such as AltaVista and directories such as Yahoo.