ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Archie search engine

Okay kiddo, let me explain to you what Archie search engine is. You know how you go to search engines like Google or Bing and type in what you are looking for, and then the search engine takes you to a bunch of websites that have information related to what you typed? Well, Archie is a search engine that was created a long time ago, before Google or Bing existed.

Archie was created in 1990 by a group of students at a university in Canada. At the time, there were a lot of different computer networks all over the world, and people were sharing a lot of information on these networks. But it was hard to find what you were looking for because there was no easy way to search for it. So, the students created Archie to help people search for things on these networks.

Now, let's talk about how it works. Archie is what we call a "search engine" but it's not like the search engines we have today. It didn't search the entire internet. Instead, it searched for something called "FTP sites". FTP stands for "File Transfer Protocol" and it's a way for people to share files with each other over the internet.

So, when you went to Archie, you could type in what you were looking for (like "pictures of cats" or "recipes for cookies") and Archie would go through all the FTP sites that it knew about and find files that matched what you were looking for. Once it found these files, it would give you a list of all the FTP sites where you could download them.

Archie was really useful at the time because there weren't many other ways to search for things on these computer networks. But eventually, other search engines like Google and Bing were created that could search the entire internet, not just FTP sites. So Archie kind of became outdated and isn't used much anymore. But it was an important step in the history of search engines!