Usenet Usenet is a worldwide distributed discussion system. It was developed from the general-purpose UUCP dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979, and it was established in 1980.[1] Users read and post messages (called articles or posts, and collectively termed news) to one or more categories, known as newsgroups. Usenet resembles a bulletin board system (BBS) in many respects and is the precursor to forums that are widely used today. Usenet can be superficially regarded as a hybrid between email and web forums. Discussions are threaded, as with web forums and BBSs, though posts are stored on the server sequentially. Usenet is a collection of user-submitted notes or messages on various subjects that are posted to servers on a worldwide network. Each subject collection of posted notes is known as a newsgroup. There are thousands of newsgroups and it is possible for you to form a new one. Most newsgroups are hosted on Internet-connected servers, but they can also be hosted from servers that are not part of the Internet.

A system that pre-dates the for organizing and displaying files on Internet servers. A Gopher server presents its contents as a hierarchically structured list of files. With the ascendance of the Web, many gopher databases were converted to Web sites which can be more easily accessed via Web search engines .

The Gopher protocol is a TCP/IP application layer protocol designed for distributing, searching, and retrieving documents over the Internet. The Gopher protocol was strongly oriented towards a menu-document design and presented an alternative to the World Wide Web in its early stages, but ultimately HTTP became the dominant protocol. The Gopher ecosystem is often regarded as the effective predecessor of the World Wide Web. The protocol was invented by a team led by Mark P. McCahill at the University of Minnesota. It offers some features not natively supported by the Web and imposes a much stronger hierarchy on information stored on it. WAIS Wide Area Information Server, WAIS developed by Thinking Machines Inc. in 1988 as an indexing, searching, and retrieval tool that catalogs the entire file (instead of only the document title) and allows users to search thousands of documents.

Wide Area Information Server (WAIS) is a client–server text searching system that uses the ANSI Standard Z39.50 Information Retrieval Service Definition and Protocol Specifications for Library Applications" (Z39.50:1988) to search index databases on remote computers. It was developed in the late 1980s as a project of Thinking Machines, Apple Computer, Dow Jones, and KPMG Peat Marwick.

Archie Archie is a tool for indexing FTP archives, allowing people to find specific files. It is considered to be the first Internet .[1] The original implementation was written in 1990 by , then a postgraduate student at McGill University in Montreal, and Bill Heelan, who studied at Concordia University in Montreal and worked at McGill University at the same time Archie is a program that allows you to search the files of all the Internet FTP servers that offer anonymous FTP. Archie is actually an indexing spider that visits each anonymous FTP site, reads all the directory and file names, and then indexes them in one large index. A user can then query Archie, which checks the query against its index. To use Archie, you can Telnet to a server that you know has Archie on it and then enter Archie search commands. However, it's easier to use a forms interface on the Web called ArchiePlex. Search engines Types Crawlers These types of search engines use a "spider" or a "crawler" to search the Internet. The crawler digs through individual web pages, pulls out keywords and then adds the pages to the search engine's database. Google and Yahoo are examples of crawler search engines. Directories Directories are human powered search engines. A website is submitted to the directory and must be approved for inclusion by editorial staff. Open Directory Project and the Internet Public Library are examples of directories. Hybrids Hybrids are a mix of crawlers and directories. Sometimes, you have a choice when you search whether to search the Web or a directory. Other times, you may receive both human powered results and crawler results for the same search. In this case, the human results are usually listed first. Meta Meta search engines are ones that search several other search engines at once and combines the results into one list. While you get more results with meta search engines, the relevancy and quality of the results may sometimes suffer. Dogpile and Clusty are examples of meta search engines.