Earlier this fall, when Alan Emtage, BSc’87, MSc’91, was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame, he wore a bright red McGill tie. It was a tribute to the school where he achieved pioneer status in 1989 when he created Archie, generally regarded as the world’s first Internet search engine.
“The recognition is flattering,” says Emtage. “But it’s also weird because it’s something that happened 30 years ago. I don’t think of myself as a visionary, it was just a matter of being at the right place at the right time.”
Emtage wasn’t the only person working on an Internet search engine in the late eighties, but Archie was the first to be publicly distributed, which is why he’s considered an innovator.
Today, search engines like Google are known as complex pieces of software, but back then, Emtage’s goal was merely to create something simple to make his work at the School of Computer Science a little less tedious.
At the time, modems operated at unfathomably slow speeds of 9,600 bit/s and were prone to slowdowns and clogging. Emtage timed his searches for FTP archives so they could be done at night when no one else in the department was using the Internet. That way the information he needed would be available in the morning when he got to the office and his colleagues could use the Internet during the day without restriction.
As sophisticated as search engines have become, Emtage says Archie created a basic template that’s still being followed today.
“Archie developed the principles that these search engines work on, which is basically go out there, retrieve information, index it and allow people to search through,” he explains. “Those were the basic building blocks of every search engine.”
Emtage, who lived in Montreal from 1983 to 1997 and got to experience the personal computer and Internet booms firsthand here, long ago moved from search engines to website building as the chief technical officer for Mediapolis, a web development company based in New York.
As a respected elder statesman, he has kept tabs on the evolution of search engines – and has thoughts about the ethical dilemmas posed by powerful modern technology.
The World Wide Web revolutionized searches far beyond what Archie could do by using hypertext to link everything together. Now there are issues when it comes to privacy and the rise of personalized searches that attempt to interpret what a user may want.
“Google may cut out entire parts of the search domain they may think you don’t want to see, but [those missing parts] could contain valuable gems of information you now won’t be able to get,” Emtage says. “And they’ll do it without your knowledge.”
He also points out that public records – everything from deeds to criminal records – are now finger strokes away from billions of people around the world. Whereas, in the past, someone needed to take the time and make the effort to physically visit an archive in order to seek out certain types of information, anyone can now learn all sorts of things about another person in seconds.
“Security by obscurity,” he says, no longer exists. “Things are more available than ever before, but what does that mean?”
Then there’s the matter of tailoring search engine results in potentially unethical ways.
“It’s possible to go in there and subtly manipulate political stories. What would happen if [major tech companies] started picking sides in an election and manipulating search results? The power they hold is phenomenal and we know nothing about them. They’re private companies with no regulations telling them they can’t manipulate results,” he cautions.
Emtage says he is humbled to find himself in such august company in the Internet Hall of Fame (other 2017 inductees include Craig Partridge, known as one of the key architects of email). Emtage has never worked a day as a direct employee of a major corporation and takes pride in having maintained a sense of independence throughout his working life.
The Internet Hall of Fame ceremony did reinforce one longstanding belief of his: No one could have predicted the impact of the Internet back when the foundation was being laid.
“There were a lot of old timers there from the early seventies, and we were all saying if anyone says they knew it would basically revolutionize human life, they’re lying,” he says. “No one had any idea back then.”
