I need a brief history of web search. What was the first web based
search engine? Any user numbers out there?

Hi jallen62:

There are many excellent brief histories of search engines out there:

A Brief History of Search Engines
URL: http://www.webreference.com/authoring/search_history/
Quote: "The very first tool used for searching on the Internet was
called "Archie". (The name stands for "archives" without the "v", not
the kid from the comics). It was created in 1990 by Alan Emtage, a
student at McGill University in Montreal. The program downloaded the
directory listings of all the files located on public anonymous FTP
(File Transfer Protocol) sites, creating a searchable database of
filenames."

A History of Search Engines
URL: http://www.webreference.com/authoring/search_history/
Quote: "The grandfather of all search engines was Archie, created in
1990 by Alan Emtage, a student at McGill University in Montreal. The
author originally wanted to call the program "archives," but had to
shorten it to comply with the Unix world standard of assigning
programs and files short, cryptic names such as grep, cat, troff, sed,
awk, perl, and so on."

History of Search Engines & Web History
URL: http://www.search-marketing.info/search-engine-history/
Quote: "The first search engine created was Archie, created in 1990 by
Alan Emtage, a student at McGill University in Montreal. The original
intent of the name was "archives," but Unix standards required a
shorter filename."

So, history agrees that Archie was the first search engine. 

As for volume of searches or numbers of users that archie had
originally, that's hard to find. However, it can't be very much:

An Internet archive server server (was about Lisp) 
URL: http://groups-beta.google.com/group/comp.archives/msg/a77343f9175b24c3?output=gplain
Quote: "Alan has a set of shell scripts that automagically calls 
up some subset of our list of servers each night (to keep 
load down on any one machine) and do a remote 'ls' on that 
machine.  We cycle through the entire list in about a 
month, so no entry can be more than that old. For what 
it's worth, we currently know of about 210 sites."
Note: This is from the original usenet announcement of archie. With
only 210 sites, the amount of usage must have been very low to start.

Search Strategy (on Google):
* "history of search engines" 
* users "search engine" archie 
* "daily volume" "search engine" archie 
* "search engine" archie  
* "search engine" archie statistics  
* "search engine statistics" "searches per day" 

I hope this helps!

websearcher

Excellent! Thanks