Editing Archie (search engine) (section)

==Function==
The earliest versions of Archie would simply search a list of public anonymous [[File Transfer Protocol]] (FTP) sites using the [[Telnet]] protocol and create index files available via FTP. To view the contents of a file, it had first to be downloaded. The indexes are updated on a regular basis (contacting each roughly once a month, so as not to waste too many resources of the remote servers) by requesting a listing. These listings were stored in local files to be searched using the [[Unix]] {{kbd|[[grep]]}} command.

The developers populated the engine's servers with databases of anonymous FTP host directories.<ref>{{Cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=3giDAwAAQBAJ&q=archie+search+engine&pg=PT49|title=A Rough Guide to the Internet|last=West|first=Nicholas|publisher=Lulu.com|isbn=9781471005374|language=en}}</ref> This was used to find specific file titles since the list was plugged in to a searchable database of FTP sites.<ref>{{Cite book|title=Search Engine Optimization Bible |last=Ledford|first=Jerri L.|date=2015|publisher=John Wiley & Sons |isbn=9780470452646 |location=Hoboken, NJ|pages=4}}</ref> Archie did not recognize natural language requests nor index the content inside the files. Therefore, users had to know the title of the file they wanted. The ability to index the content inside the files was later introduced by [[Gopher (protocol)|Gopher]].