Given the number of hosts being used as archive sites nowadays, there can be great difficulty in finding needed software in a distributed environment. You may know that the software that you need is out there, but it can sometimes be difficult to find. Perhaps the best known application of the archie system is to maintain this Internet Archives database. The database, already available from a number of service providers across the Internet, currently contains the names of over 2,400,000 files at over 1,000 anonymous FTP archive sites. Using this database, users can rapidly locate needed files without the need to log onto dozens or even hundreds of machines.
Users can ask archie to search for specific name strings.
In this example, you could thus find those archive sites that are storing Kyoto Common Lisp. With one central database for all the archive sites we know about, archie greatly speeds the task of finding a specific program on the net. The 'whatis' command allows you to search this database. But the archie system is much more than the Internet Archives database. With the latest release, archie has been expanded into a generalized information gathering and distributed database maintenance tool.