The first search engine was called Archie, which was created in 1990 by Alan Emtage, a student at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Archie was not a traditional search engine in the sense that it did not crawl and index web pages. Rather, it searched the filenames of FTP sites and created an index that allowed users to locate files on those sites.
However, the first search engine to actually crawl and index web pages was called WebCrawler, which was developed by Brian Pinkerton at the University of Washington in 1993. It was followed by other early search engines like Lycos, AltaVista, and Yahoo!