Long before Google became a verb, Yahoo emerged as a gateway to the internet, and before billions of people typed questions into search bars each day, a young Caribbean student quietly solved one of the internet’s earliest and most frustrating problems.

His name was Alan Emtage.

Born and raised in Barbados, Emtage would go on to create what historians recognise as the world’s first internet search engine. Yet while search technology evolved into an industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars and created some of the wealthiest individuals in modern history, the Caribbean pioneer who laid the foundation for it all received little financial reward and only belated recognition.