Back in the day, anonymous FTP were a sizable part of the web (especially for good quality source code and scientific data/papers/comment). Some of them stored

Back in the day, anonymous FTP were a sizable part of the web (especially for good quality source code and scientific data/papers/comment). Some of them stored full backups of the lion's share of USEnet (and still do to this day). FTPsearch filled a large void, and was blazingly fast compared to other search engines. In these days you waited for 15-20 seconds before the likes of Yahoo, Lycos and Altavista started showing results. Without tabbed browsing, to boot.