Veronica (search engine)
Template:Short description Veronica was a search engine system for the Gopher protocol, released in November 1992<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> by Steven Foster and Fred Barrie at the University of Nevada, Reno.<ref name="eff">Template:Cite web</ref>
During its existence, Veronica was a constantly updated database of the names of almost every menu item on thousands of Gopher servers. The Veronica database could be searched from most major Gopher menus. Although by 1999 the original Veronica database was no longer accessible,<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> various local Veronica installations and at least one complete rewrite ("Veronica-2") still exist.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
The existence of Veronica induced another Gopher search tool from the University of Utah originally called Jughead.<ref name="eff" /> While the two were separate search tools, a Jughead instance could be configured with a veronica control file in order to let the Veronica harvester know how to obtain the data file from Jughead.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
Naming
The search engine was named after the character Veronica Lodge from Archie Comics, an intentional analogy with the naming of the Archie search engine, a search engine for FTP servers. A backronym for Veronica is "Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index to Computer Archives".<ref>Template:Cite web</ref><ref>Cory Doctorow, at about 12:37 Cory states in his podcast what Veronica stands for.</ref>
See also
- Archie – a search engine for finding FTP files.
- Jughead – an alternative search engine system for the Gopher protocol.
- WAIS – another client-server text searching system of the same era.
References
External links
- local-veronica source
- Search Veronica-2 an actively indexed re-implementation of Veronica.