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, developed an FTP site archive called Archie to index the internet. The Archie was regarded as the first search engine.
The earliest versions of Archie simply contacted a list of FTP archives on a regular basis (contacting each roughly once a month) Archie is a tool for indexing FTP archives, allowing people to find specific files.
The script allowed people to login and search collected information using telnet protocol at the host. 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.
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.