Hi,
Just heard about and tried out Veronica, the gopher answer to archie. It
is fabulous! My apologies if this has been reported before, but even so,
it bears repeating!
Happy gophering,
Cheers,
Harry
Harry Mangalam Vox:(619) 453-4100, x250
Dept of Biocomputing Fax:(619) 552-1546
The Salk Institute mangalam at salk-sc2.sdsc.edu
10010 N Torrey Pines Rd mangalam at salk-sgi.sdsc.edu
La Jolla CA 92037 mangalam at salk.bitnet
About the Veronica service
VERONICA: Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index to
Computerized Archives.
Veronica offers a keyword search of most gopher-server menus
in the entire gopher web. As Archie is to ftp archives,
Veronica is to gopherspace. Unlike Archie, the search
results can connect you directly to the data source. Imagine
an Archie search that lets you select the data, not just the
host sites, directly from a menu. Because Veronica is
accessed through a gopher client, it is easy to use, and
gives access to all types of data supported by the gopher
protocol.
Veronica was designed as a response to the problem of
resource discovery in the rapidly-expanding gopher web.
Frustrated comments in the net news-groups have recently
reflected the need for such a service. Additional
motivation came from the comments of naive gopher users,
several of whom assumed that a simple-to-use service would
provide a means to find resources "without having to know
where they are."
The result of a Veronica search is an automatically-
generated gopher menu, customized according to the user's
keyword specification. Items on this menu may be drawn from
many gopher servers. These are functional gopher items,
immediately accessible via the gopher client ... just
double-click to open directories, read files, or perform
other searches -- across hundreds of gopher servers. You
need never know which server is actually involved in filling
your request for information. Items that are appear
particularly interesting can be saved in the user's bookmark
list.
Notice that these are NOT full-text searches of data at
gopher-server sites, just as Archie does not index the
contents of ftp sites, but only the names of files at those
sites. Veronica indexes the TITLES on all levels of the
menus, for most gopher sites in the Internet. 258 gophers
are indexed by Veronica on Nov. 17, 1992; we have
discovered over 500 servers and will index the full set in
the near future. We hope that Veronica will encourage
gopher administrators to use very descriptive titles on
their menus.
To try Veronica, select it from the "Other Gophers" menu on
Minnesota's gopher server, or point your gopher at:
Name=Veronica (search menu items in most of GopherSpace)
Type=1 Port=70 Path=1/Veronica Host=futique.scs.unr.edu
Veronica is an experimental service, developed by Steve
Foster and Fred Barrie at University of Nevada. As we
expect that the load will soon outgrow our hardware, we will
distribute the Veronica service across other sites in the
near future.
Please address comments to: gophadm at futique.scs.unr.edu
November 17, 1992
Steve Foster
