Veronica (search engine)

Veronica was a search engine system for the Gopher protocol, developed in 1992 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.

The name, although officially a backronym for "Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index to Computer Archives", was chosen to match that of the FTP search service known as Archie — Veronica Lodge being the name of another character from the Archie Comics.

See also

• Jughead — an alternative search engine system for the Gopher protocol.
• Archie — a search engine for finding FTP files.
• WAIS — another client-server text searching system of the same era.

External links

• local-veronica source
• Search Veronica-2 an actively indexed re-implementation of Veronica. Note: this link uses the gopher protocol so it may not work in most modern browsers.