It's hard to believe that something as ubiquitous in our lives as search engines are today, were only developed around 3 decades ago.

Leading the way was "Archie" first developed in 1986 by Alan Emtage, a post-graduate student at McGill University in Montreal. "Archie" was a tool for indexing FTP archives which enabled users to more easily identify specific files. Within 10 years, it had been overtaken by more sophisticated search engines such as Yahoo! and ultimately, Google.