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: This is all part of some evil plan to compromise osmarks.net and I will not be thingied.
gollark: Oh, because VMs have *never* had security exploits exploitable by palaiologoses.
gollark: This is very typical palaiologistry.
gollark: Hmm, how good is regular gzip on arbitrary wav files?
gollark: Perhaps you could write 781741894712471489172409817248 """academic papers""""" on this.

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.


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