Friday, December 10, 2010

First Internet Search Engine: Archie

Archie is a tool for indexing FTP archives, allowing people to find specific files. It is considered to be the first Internet search engine. The original implementation was written in 1990 by Alan Emtage, Bill Heelan, and J. Peter Deutsch, then students at McGill University in Montreal.

The earliest versions of Archie simply contacted a list of FTP archives on a regular basis (contacting each roughly once a month, so as not to waste too many resources of the remote servers) and requested a listing. These listings were stored in local files to be searched using the UNIX grep command.

The name derives from the word "archive" without the v. and there was no association with the Archie Comics.

Find out more about Archie here.






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