We brought back the internet's first search engine [video]

It's slightly amusing to me that this would show up just now, as I literally just went down a very similar rabbit-hole yesterday. Except instead of looking for old Archie software, I was looking for old WAIS[1] software. And in the process of doing that, the thought crossed my mind that I'd probably need to poke around a myriad of half-abandoned ftp sites, and "boy, wouldn't it be nice if I could use archie!".

In fact, I think I may have glanced at the headline of this very same video while I was scratching around looking for stuff about searching "the old web" (for lack of a better term).

In the end, one thing that turned out to be fairly fruitful was connecting to the Floodgap[2] gopher server and using Veronica-2[3] to search.

There's all sorts of interesting old stuff lying around out there, if you can find it.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_area_information_server

[2]: https://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/

[3]: http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw?ss=gopher%3A%2F%2Fgophe...