Archie is a tool designed to search ftp repositories around the world for given filenames or keywords. It's usefulness is limited to situations where the user knows either a part of a filename or a whole filename of the desired file. In situations where the user wishes to do a subject matter search, the quality of its result is largely chance. In many situations, attempted searches did not work at all, simply returning an error.
Of all exact filename searches, many results were returned, such as the following:
Host sutro.sfsu.edu
Location: /humanities/NET/cyberspaceHumanities.course
FILE -rw-r--r-- 145 Feb 6 1994 virtual_building_project.txt
Host ftp.cs.sunysb.edu
Location: /pub
DIRECTORY drwxr-xr-x 512 Sep 24 01:44 virtual
Host relay.cs.toronto.edu
Location: /ca-domain/registrations-hierarchical
FILE -rwxrwxrwx 32 Jan 21 21:41 virtual
Host ftp.cs.uchicago.edu
Location: /pub/discussions/cpsr/annual
FILE -rw-r--r-- 3110 Sep 13 10:57 virtual.html
After pursuing some of these results using ftp, it was found that a very large portion of the files found were technical papers in the postscript file format. For users with large screened monitors and fast internet connections, this is a very acceptable format to research with. The situation is not so convenient for users with PCs and modem connections. For this (very large) group of users, the process of viewing these files is both costly and time consuming. In order to easily view the papers, it is necessary to print them, thus defeating the purpose of the electronic versions. To overcome this problem, it would be advantageous to store these files in a less bulky format such as hypertext markup language (HTML) or rich text format (RTF).
With the proliferation of the world wide web, it has become clear that archie is no longer a very valuable tool. The search capabilities of the web search engines renders archie obsolete.