Finding Information on FTP Servers

• Ftp servers have a strictly hierarchical structure. Traversing such structure is easy.
  
  
• Ftp servers cannot contain "links" to each other, so one has to know where all the servers are.
  
  
• Ftp servers do not provide meta-information on their files, apart from name, date and size. When looking for text one has to guess which files contain text.
  
  
• Descriptions, often found in "README" files, are not linked to the documents, making it difficult to use them for automated searching.

Despite the poor architecture of ftp servers, the Archie tool for locating files on ftp servers is very popular and useful for locating software and documentation.
Archie, the Internet Archive Server Listing Service only knows about the names of the files, so the user can only search for filenames.
The Delft University of Technology (among others) offers a WWW to Archie gateway at http://www.twi.tudelft.nl/Local/archieplex/doc/form.html, so Archie queries can be answered using a WWW form.