Putting the Internet to Work for You

For all the advantages of the FTP system, there’s also a basic problem: how do you know what files are available where? Indeed, this is part of a more fundamental problem on the Internet that has to do with the missing road maps and still-unfinished highways that we’ve been talking about through this site.
A group of students at the McGill University school of computer science recognized the problem and, with some ingenuity and skillful programming, solved it by creating an FTP database system called Archie. The Archie system automatically gathers and indexes the hundreds of FTP archives available and then distributes the comprehensive index to a variety of Archie sites through the Internet.
With Archie, you can locate any file available through FTP. The downside is that there really isn’t much information contained in the Archie database. Archie filenames don’t tell you much about the contents of the file, and, unfortunately, that’s all you have to work with.
Nevertheless, you can often infer some information about a file by its location, which may offer some assistance. Let’s take a look at directory naming that can help you find what you’re looking for. A directory such as pub/archives/mac/ business/stocks, for example, is a likely place to find stock-market-related files and applications. You can use this to help your searches. In this case, if we search for mac and stocks, we could match the files in this directory.
Archie’s Internet archives database contains an entry including the name, location, host system, size, and file type of more than 2,250,000 files at more than 1,000 anonymous FTP archive sites. To give you some sense of how popular Archie has become, public Archie servers currently receive more than 50,000 queries each day. With more than 2,000,000 files available, you won’t be surprised to find that the Archie database is massive, far too massive to be found on lots of different sites on the Internet. Fortunately, that’s not a problem because a number of computer systems offer public access to Archie for anyone who can use telnet (see preceding section on telnet) to connect to their machines.