Archie Search Engine

Archie was the first search engine, created in 1990 by Alan Emtage, Bill Heelan, and J. Peter Deutsch who were students at the time attending McGill University in Montreal. The original idea for the name was archives but this was shortened and known as Archie. In September 1990 Alan Emtage referred to Archie as "pretty brain-damaged" although later he showed more confidence in the abilities of Archie.

When Archie was first created it downloaded the directory listings of all the files on public anonymous FTP (File Transfer Protocol) sites. This was only done on a regular basis therefore not wasting too many resources. After a while more efficient versions developed, improving the front and back ends of the system. Once the developed system worked the system then spread from a local tool, to a network wide resource, to a popular service available from sites around the Internet. The Archie servers could be accessed in the following ways:

1. Using a local client (Archie or xarchie)
2. Telneting to a server directly
3. Sending queried by electronic mail

Archie didn’t work as well as search engines do today although it allowed users to search the Internet for files they were looking for. Archie became like a database of web filenames which it used to match the users queries. Archie didn’t index the content of text files and therefore in 1991 Gopher developed another search enabling this.

Archie servers processed approximately 50,000 queries per day which was generated by a few thousand users worldwide. Every two months of Internet growth required another replica of Archie A dozen Archie services had to replicate continually developing the database of records. Information shows that Archie took longer to answer queries during the week compared to a Saturday night as traffic was less.

In 1992 Archie contained roughly 2.6 million files with 150 gigabytes of information. Later in 1993 reports said that Archie was still active although they were seeing some signs of strain in handling searches. Currently there are very few Archie servers which are still in operation although one gateway can be found in Poland.

Members of the Archie group are:

• Sean Ward
• Cormac Sweeney
• Peter Somerville
• Scott Withers
• Sian Thompson
• Leeza Smyth
• William Sproule