Archie (search engine)
Archie was a search engine specially designed for indexing FTP archives. The name comes from the English word to archive ("to archive").
The idea for Archie was born in 1990 by the students Alan Emtage, Peter Deutsch and Bill Heelan, who were studying at the McGill University School of Computer Science in Montreal at the time . They began to program so-called search robots that systematically combed the Internet and collected information. So in November 1990 Archie V1.0 was created , which could be queried via Telnet .
Archie's goal was to create a central database in which the directories and files of the distributed and widely used anonymous FTP servers should be contained. This should make the search for files and programs via a central database much easier.
Using the Archie service , however, it was only possible to find content of which at least parts and fragments were known to the searcher, since the search was limited to the file and directory names that were on the FTP servers. There were also only eight characters available for the search string, so that an Archie search required quite precise search parameters in order to get meaningful results.
Archie only had a very minor role on the Internet. The complex operation and the emerging World Wide Web pushed Archie into the background. Many developers jumped into WWW technology and used it as a basis for search engines. The real reason for Archie's end were legal problems, which led to the fact that in 1999 all Archie servers worldwide were shut down within a very short time .
Web links
- netplanet.org → Services → Archie Introductory article about Archie and a small user guide
- Archie query
Individual evidence
- ↑ Network FAQ. University computer center of the TU Darmstadt, archived from the original on March 23, 2008 ; Retrieved April 1, 2010 .