Veronica
(ver 0.6b)
Abandonware


Veronica is the original global Document Search Engine for Gopher, 
and was developed at the University of Nevada in Reno in 1992. 
Veronica is a menu-oriented search engine, which was inspired by 
the FTP search engine Archie. Although claimed to be an acronym, 
meaning Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Netwide Index to Computerized 
Archives, it is a tounge-in-cheek allusion to the Archie comics
(characters of which include Archie, Veronica, and Jughead).
 
A major advantage of Veronica over the Archie search engine is that 
the titles are not restricted to file names, but can also consist 
of whole sentences. Logical requests with “and”, “or” and “not” in 
combination with the search term is possible with Veronica as well.

Although often thought of as a global search engine (due to having 
been used on the University of Minnesota mother gopher), it can also  
be used as a local search engine to index a single Gopher server.  

"Veronica.local" is in fact "Veronica".  


----------
Jughead and Veronica were developed independently
(and without each others knowledge) but within a 
very very short time of each other.  

Jughead's design goal was to create a database, and search 
utility of that database, for a universities gopherspace.
Maybe you would say crawler, tree tool or hierarchy, 
and server to diseminate the data via a search query. 

Veronica was to do the same, but over all gopherspace.
With that said, some period later (within a year?) 
"Veronica.local" was made, or rather un-made, from
Veronica to do what Jughead was doing. At the same time, 
or very nearly so, some were trying to use Jughead to do 
what Veronica was doing. 

The literal only version of Veronica that was once 
available on the Internet was the version called 
Veronica.local (used to more or less emulate how Jughead 
was first intended to be used). However, looking at the 
code, you could see remnants in the README and elsewhere 
which indicated that veronica.local was simply a hamstrung 
version of full Veronica, that was merely limiting the 
range of Gopherspace searching by eliminating the necessary 
'seed' links in the configuration file.  

Chris at Hal3000.cx uses Veronica to index all Gopherspace.  
He uses a spider (gspider) to first crawl Gopherspace. This 
gives him, after a few days, a large list of sites, which 
were found by tracing each link encountered.  He then uses 
a few tools (like sed) to work on this list to create his 
seed file of sites.  These sites are then inserted into 
the configuration file for Veronica to 'tree'.