Veronica (search engine)

Veronica was a search engine system for the Gopher protocol, released in November 1992[1] by Steven Foster and Fred Barrie at the University of Nevada, Reno.

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 the original Veronica database is no longer accessible, various local Veronica installations and at least one complete rewrite ("Veronica-2") still exist.

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".[2] [3]

gollark: Well, I mostly don't like it because of the cryoapioformic Microsoft.
gollark: iotop seems to only care about disk IO.
gollark: Unfortunately, my graphs™ do not have some sort of per-process network use breakdown.
gollark: On an unrelated note, apparently some application seems to now be shoving several megabits a second of data over my server's loopback interface.
gollark: I suppose this is another one of those cases where a technically inferior solution took over the world somewhat because of unrelated factors.

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
  1. "Navigating the Internet - Penn Printout, Feb 1993". upenn.edu. Archived from the original on August 22, 2018.
  2. Museum, Web Design. "Veronica search engine - 1992 | Web Design Museum". www.webdesignmuseum.org.
  3. Cory Doctorow, at about 12:37 Cory states in his podcast what Veronica stands for.


This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.