TIL the first Internet search engine was “Archie”, which was created in 1990 by Alan Emtage, a postgraduate student at McGill University in Montreal. It’s still around today
Used it all the time in the early 90s. Even though the tech was very primitive back then, I miss the academic spirit and open collaborative nature of it all. Corporate greed has really wrecked the open web.
It was also the name of an insane computer intelligence in a tabletop RPG game called RIFTS by Palladium Books. It originally appeared in RIFTS Sourcebook One from 1991, about a year after the initial release of Archie (the search engine). I don't know if the writer, Kevin Sembieda, took the name of the AI, A.R.C.H.I.E. Three, from this search engine or if it's just something he worked up on his own, but I've always thought that was kind of funny.