			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.  A veronica search produces a menu of
gopher items, each of which is a direct pointer to a gopher data source.
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@futique.scs.unr.edu

November 17, 1992 
Steve Foster




