From: tcmay@got.net (Timothy C. May)
Sure enough, a search of "Cyberia-l" in Alta Vista showed all sorts of hits, including what appeared to be several _private archives_ of parts of the traffic. (By "private" I mean in the sense that they were someone's personal archives, and not necessarily complete or even semi-officially sanctioned.)
There are any number of reasons this migh have shown up - if the private archives are accessible to the public, for example ... but ...
Declan McCullagh, on the Cyberia-l list, followed up to my post on this topic by noting that things will really get interesting when the internal file systems of many sites are made searchable, such as with the Andrew File System (AFS) at CMU and elsewhere. Apparently most users make their directories accessible to others.
... I was under the impression that the only documents that most web crawlers will search are documents that are link-accessible. Are you saying that this isn't true? Are you saying that Alta-Vista will search EVERYTHING that's publicly accessible, whether by anonymous FTP or web?