Veronica

The name actually stands for "Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Netwide Index to Computerized Archives." Pretty weird, I know. The "rodent" part of the acronym refers to how the Veronica utility allows you to search all of the world's gopher servers using keywords. (That's about 10 million items from over 6,000 gopher servers.) After searching for the terms, Veronica displays a list of gopher menus and articles containing the keywords you searched for. The more recent versions of Veronica can also search certain webpages, newsgroups, and FTP sites.

Unlike most search engines, Veronica searches for keywords only in gopher server menu titles, and doesn't look through the entire text of documents. When searching with Veronica, you can use the logical operators AND, NOT, and OR to help narrow your search. Also, typing an asterisk (*) at the end of a word will match anything starting with that word. Sound familiar to any Unix users?

Published: 2003