I still find useful things with Google searches that are hosted on FTP, so this seems very odd and unfortunate. I'd say the "file-based web" is still very much alive. A lot of those files I've come across (usually old software and docs) are unlikely to be found anywhere else, as I'm not even sure if archive.org archives FTP sites. IMHO this is a significant part of the Internet that must be kept alive, because it holds invaluable amounts of irreplaceable data.