AIM INTERVIEWS

Who are you?

I'm a computer scientist who happened to be in the right place at the right time, working on the early Internet when it was still small enough that one person could build something that changed how people used it. Most people know me because I created Archie, the first search engine, while I was a graduate student at McGill University. But more broadly, I'm someone who has spent a career thinking about infrastructure—how systems scale, how standards enable growth, and how small technical decisions can echo for decades.

You created Archie in 1990 to index and search FTP archives. It is considered the first ever Internet search engine. Why did you decide to work on Archie? Was there any inspiration?

Archie wasn't born from a grand vision. It was born from irritation. At the time, the Internet already had a lot of useful software and other data sitting on FTP servers, but finding anything was tedious. You had to manually browse directories or rely on word of mouth. That didn't scale, and it felt inefficient in a network that was supposed to make information easier to access.

So the inspiration was practical. I was a graduate student with access to machines and a problem that annoyed me. I wrote a program to download directory listings, index them, and make them searchable. It started as a small side project - basically a way to save myself time and avoid answering the same questions over and over. What surprised me wasn't that the idea worked, but how quickly people started relying on it once it existed. That was my first real lesson: once something is useful, people adopt it very quickly.

As the web gained popularity, search engines like AltaVista and Yahoo began to take over in 1995. What do you think was unique about the new search engines that followed Archie? At the time, did you have a sense for what the ideal state for search on the Internet should look like?

Archie indexed filenames. The next generation indexed documents and meaning. That was the real shift. Once the Web arrived, the problem wasn't just locating files—it was navigating an explosion of content. Search engines like AltaVista and later Google added ranking, relevance, and speed at scale. They turned search from a directory into a discovery system.

As for the "ideal state," I don't think anyone had a complete picture. But there were a few principles that felt obvious even then: search had to be comprehensive, fast, and trustworthy.

We understood the direction, but not the magnitude. None of us predicted just how central search would become to daily life.

You were also a founding member of the Internet Society along with other Internet pioneers like Vint Cerf and Tim Berners-Lee. What was it like to work on the standard for the Internet protocol with that group? Were there any particular decisions you think were crucial to the continued success of the Internet?

Working with people like Vint, Jon Postel and Tim was both ordinary and extraordinary. Ordinary, because it felt like engineering meetings - arguments about syntax, interoperability, and edge cases. Extraordinary, because we all understood that the decisions had to be simple enough to last and that we were working on something far bigger than ourselves.

The crucial choice wasn't any single technical detail. It was the commitment to openness. We built standards that anyone could implement. No licenses, no gatekeepers, no proprietary lock-in. That decision - open protocols, publicly documented - did more to ensure the Internet's success than any specific piece of code.

Are there any people or projects you particularly admire today?

I have a soft spot for people who solve unglamorous problems well. Indexing, routing, storage, reliability. Those aren't flashy fields, but they're where progress actually happens.

I think the fact that the majority of software that runs the Internet is open source, with critical parts often maintained by a small group or even one person. I think the best example of that is Dave Mills who built and maintained the NTP stack for decades. If you haven't encountered him you should look him up. Without him the clockwork precision with which the Internet is run would never have been possible.

What's a message you have for the world?

Technology is not magic. It's plumbing.

When it works, people stop noticing it. When it breaks, everything stops.

So invest in the boring things: standards, maintenance, interoperability, education. They don't make headlines, but they make progress possible.