The Internet Archive Server Listing Service
builds a database of information available on ftp servers.
- Each ftp-server must contain a (compressed) catalog ls-lR.Z
- The system administrator notifies the maintainers of the Archie database,
at the McGill University in Montreal.
- The Archie archive site runs a (nightly) program that rebuilds the
"index-database" from the catalogs of the ftp-servers.
(Since servers cannot contain links to each other, only the registered
servers are searched.)
- The database is copied to a number of mirror-sites on Internet.
- Everyone can search for servers containing files with a given name.
The ALIWEB system does Archie Like Indexing for the Web.
The "catalog" is a manually generated summary document
site.idx.
Both Archie and Aliweb ignore the real contents of the documents on the
servers.
Their usability depends completely on how meaningful the names of documents
or their descriptions are.
The Delft University of Technology offers a WWW form to access
Archie, at
http://www.twi.tudelft.nl/Local/archieplex/doc/form.html.
Through this form a large number of Archie (mirror) servers can be
accessed, but the TUD has no server of its own.
The main Aliweb server is located at
http://www.nexor.co.uk/public/aliweb/search/doc/form.html.