African American Innovators in Tech | Alan Emtage

Although search engines like Google and Yahoo have become prominent today. The history of web-based search engines goes as far back as the 1980s. The invention of the first internet search is credited to Alan Emtage, a Black technologist. As a graduate student and a systems administrator in the I.T. department of McGill University, Montreal, Canada, Alan Emtage was responsible for finding software for faculty members and students.

He built the ARCHIE search engine (short for ‘archives’). This helps him search instead of manually looking for different File Transfer Protocol (FTP) servers. ARCHIE is the great-grandfather of search engines. The idea and processes used to develop ARCHIE were widely used to build the more robust search engines we know today.

Sadly, Alan did not enjoy the profit of his innovation like other popular search engine companies. This is because he did not patent the original idea behind ARCHIE then. Alan once explained in an interview that the reason for this was that the potential of what he developed wasn’t known back then. However, in 2017, he was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame. This is to recognize his immense contribution to the foundation of what we have as the internet today.