About the service NoseyParker is a network tool allowing users to perform searches for files stored on public FTP servers. The function of NoseyParker is not unsimilar to the well known network service Archie.
Searches Here are some details on the processing of user queries itself.
NoseyParker used to be a simple search engine in which a query from a user was translated into a regular expression which was then applied to the the database. Records that did match the regular expression were returned to the user as the result of the search. As the number of sites increased and the sites grew bigger, it became obvious that this simple mechanism is not enough anymore. Today, NoseyParker is based on a B-tree searching algorithm combined with the regular expression matching and compression. The searches are about a hundred times faster than before, reducing the waiting time to fractions of a second.