Archie search engine

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"Archie" is a tool for indexing FTP archives, allowing people to find specific files. It is considered to be the first Internet search engine.[1] The original implementation was written in 1990 by Alan Emtage and J. Peter Deutsch, then postgraduate students at McGill University in Montreal and Bill Heelan, who studied at Concordia University in Montreal and worked at McGill University at the same time.[2]

History and name

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 web-pages. 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, in imitation.

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.

See also

References

  1. ↑ "The First Search Engine, Archie". Archived from the original on 21 June 2007. Retrieved 2007-05-26. 
  2. ↑ "In Russian: History of the Internet. The First Search Engine". Retrieved 2012-02-23. 
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 "Peter Deutsch: archie - An Electronic Directory Service for the Internet". Retrieved 2012-02-23. 
  4. ↑ Life Before (And After) Archie
  5. ↑ BBC Radio 4 - Saturday Live, 7 November 2009

Further reading

External links

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