While working as a system administrator at McGill, Alan Emtage, BSc’87, MSc’91, was tasked with scouring the nascent Internet for free software. Emtage cleverly wrote an open-source program to automate this task, which he called Archie. In his mid-twenties, Emtage had created the first Internet search engine.
Archie made an incredible impact; until the mid-nineties, the non-proprietary system attracted half of web traffic in Canada, and present-day search engines like Google still rely on the work that Emtage produced while working at McGill.