"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 and Peter J. Deutsch, and Bill Heelan.
Archie is a program that allows you to search the files of all the Internet FTP servers that offer
anonymous FTP. Archie is actually an indexing spider that visits each anonymous FTP site,
reads all the directory and file names, and then indexes them in one large index. A user can
then query Archie, which checks the query against its index. To use Archie, you can Telnet to a
server that you know has Archie on it and then enter Archie search commands. However, it's
easier to use a forms
interface on the Web called ArchiePlex.
Archie is (was) an early search program that indexed files on anonymous File Transfer Protocol
(FTP) servers and allowed users to search for specific files. Archie was created by a team of
students at McGill University in 1990 - before the World Wide Web led to the adoption of
Hypertext as a means of navigation. Archie helped users find files in the directories of public
hosts that they might never have otherwise discovered.
Archie was short for archiver, and that is what it did. It ran a script that gathered data from
accessible FTP servers and created a database of all the files on publicly accessible FTP sites.
This index could then be searched by users, resulting in a list of file matches and the FTP site
where it could be found. Archie used regular expressions to handle its search queries.
Archie inspired later search programs called Veronica and Jughead, but none of these could
index the content of a file just the file name. Archie dwindled in importance as the Web
expanded, bringing new competitors and new methods of search.
The archie service began as a project for students and volunteer staff at the McGill University
School of Computer Science in 1987,[3] when Deutsch, Emtage, and Heelan were asked to
connect the School of Computer Science to the Internet.[4] The earliest versions of archie,
written by Alan Emtage, simply contacted a list of FTP archives on a regular basis (contacting
each roughly once a month, so as not to waste too much resources of the remote servers) and
requested a listing. These listings were stored in local files to be searched using the Unix grep
command.
Bill Heelan and Peter Deutsch wrote a script allowing people to login and search collected
information using telnet protocol at the host "archie.mcgill.ca" [132.206.2.3].[3] Later, more
efficient front- and back-ends were developed, and the system spread from a local tool, to a
network-wide resource, and a popular service available from multiple sites around the
Internet. The collected data would be exchanged between the neighbouring Archie servers.
The servers could be accessed in multiple ways: using a local client (such as archie or
xarchie); telneting to a server directly; sending queries by electronic mail; and later via a
World Wide Web interface. In the zenith of its fame the Archie search engine accounted for
50% of the Montreal Internet traffic.[citation needed]
In 1992, Emtage along with Peter Deutsch and some financial help of McGill University formed
Bunyip Information Systems the world's first company expressly founded for
and dedicated to providing Internet information services with a licensed commercial version
of the Archie search engine used by millions of people worldwide. Bill Heelan followed them
into Bunyip soon after, where he together with Bibi Ali and Sandro Mazzucato was a part of
so-called Archie Group. The group significantly updated the archie database and indexed webpages. Work on the search engine was ceased in the late 1990s.
The name derives from the word "archive" without the v. Alan Emtage has said that contrary
to popular belief, there was no association with the Archie Comics and that he despised them.

[5] Despite this, other early Internet search technologies such as Jughead and Veronica were
named after characters from the comics. Anarchie, one of the earliest graphical ftp clients was
named for its ability to perform Archie searches.
A legacy Archie server is still maintained active for historic purposes in Poland at University of
Warsaw's Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modelling.