Alan Emtage

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Alan Emtage (born November 27, 1964) is a Barbadian-Canadian computer scientist who created Archie, the first Internet search engine. Archie helped people find files in public FTP archives and is widely regarded as the world’s first Internet search engine. He was the son of Sir Stephen Emtage and Margot Emtage and grew up in Barbados, where he attended Harrison College and earned the Barbados Scholarship for academic excellence.

He studied at McGill University in Montreal, earning a BSc in computer science and a MSc (completed in 1991). In 1989, as a McGill student and systems administrator, he conceived and built Archie. In 1992, he co-founded Bunyip Information Systems in Montreal to provide Internet information services based on Archie.

Emtage helped found the Internet Society and chaired several groups in the Internet Engineering Task Force, including co-chairing the Uniform Resource Identifier working group that defined URLs. He was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2017. He has received honorary Doctor of Science degrees from the University of the West Indies (2019) and from McGill University (2022). He speaks on Internet information systems and serves as chief technology officer at Mediapolis, a Web engineering company in New York City.