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Today a world without Internet and search engines seems to be something of an impossibility. It is hard to imagine such a world, but the fact remains that the Internet or the World Wide Web, as we know it, only became available for public use in the 1990s. Before that there was no such technology available.

On August 6, 1991, European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) talked about the World Wide Web project, exactly two years after British scientist Tim Berners-Lee had begun creating HTML, HTTP and the first few Web pages at CERN. The early popular web browser was called ViolaWWW, which was eventually replaced by the Mosaic web browser. In 1993 the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois made version 1.0 of Mosaic available, and by late 1994 there was growing public interest in the previously academic/technical Internet.

The content offered on Internet was vast and it was difficult to find the necessary content. This introduced the need for a tool that would search the Internet. The very first tool used for searching content on the Internet was called Archie. The name stands for "archive" without the "v". It was created in 1990. This was a very basic version of the search engine as we know it today. Here the program downloaded directory listings of all the files located on public anonymous File Transfer Protocol (FTP) sites, creating a searchable database of filenames. Archie did not have the capacity to search the file contents.

The earliest versions of Archie contacted a list of FTP archives on a regular basis (contacting each roughly once a month, so as not to waste too many resources on the remote servers) and requested a listing. These listings were stored in local files to be searched using the UNIX search command. Soon, a more efficient system was developed, which spread from a local tool, to a network-wide resource, to a popular service available from multiple sites on the Internet. These Archie servers could be accessed in multiple ways: using a local client (such as Archie or xarchie); telneting to a server directly; sending queries by e-mail; and/or later via World Wide Web.

While Archie indexed computer files, Gopher, the second known search engine, indexed documents in plain text format. Gopher was created in 1991. Since it indexed text files, its applications were much nearer to today's Internet and most of the Gopher sites became full-blown websites after the creation of the World Wide Web.

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