Archie search engine

Archie was a search engine that has been specifically designed for indexing FTP archives. The name comes from the English word to archive ( " archive ").

The idea was born to Archie in 1990 by Alan Emtage, the students, Peter German and Bill Heelan, who studied at this time at the McGill University School of Computer Science in Montreal. They began to program so-called bots that systematically scoured the internet and collected information. Thus arose in November 1990 Archie V1.0, which could be queried via Telnet.

The aim of Archie was to create a central database should be included in the directories and files of the distributed and widespread anonymous FTP server. In order to search for files and programs from a central database should be greatly facilitated.

However, over the service Archie it was only possible to find content, of which the seekers were known at least parts and fragments, because the search was limited to the file and directory names that were on the FTP servers. Also stood for the search string only eight letters, so that Archie search already required quite accurate search parameters in order to obtain meaningful results.

Archie had only a very minor role in the Internet. The fairly complex operation and the emerging World Wide Web urged Archie in the background. Many developers were swinging on the WWW technology and used this as a basis for search engines. The real reason for the From Archie but were legal problems that resulted in 1999 in a very short time all the Archie servers have been set worldwide.