Veronica (search engine)

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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,[when?] various local Veronica installations and at least one complete rewrite ("Veronica-2") still exist.[further explanation needed][clarification needed]

Naming[edit]

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]

See also[edit]

References[edit]

  1. ^ "Navigating the Internet - Penn Printout, Feb 1993". upenn.edu. Archived from the original on August 22, 2018.
  2. ^ Museum, Web Design (10 March 2023). "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.

External links[edit]