Archie (search engine)

Archie is a tool for indexing FTP archives that lets users identify specific files more easily, and it is considered the first Internet search engine. The original implementation was written in 1990 by Alan Emtage, then a postgraduate student at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, who had been systems manager at the McGill School of Computer Science when it first appeared. The earliest versions searched a list of public anonymous FTP sites over Telnet and built index files from their directory listings, refreshed roughly monthly so as not to burden remote servers, and the stored listings were searched with a standard Unix text search tool. Archie did not understand natural language requests and did not index the content inside files, so users had to know the file title they wanted. The name is the word archive with the letter v dropped. Archie was displaced by Gopher search tools such as Jughead and Veronica and then by later Internet search services, and work on it ceased in the late 1990s.