 Veronica In The Meta-Burrow 

Gopherspace is vast and cavernous.  It's fun to burrow, but
if you are looking for something specific burrowing randomly
is very frustrating.  That's where Veronica comes to the res-
cue.  Veronica is an Internet service that maintains an index
of titles of gopher items.  When you ask Veronica to find 
a word(s), it returns the results of its search as a gopher
menu which can be accessed like any gopher menu.  This is
pretty cool.





 Veronica, Veronica Wherefore Art Thou Veronica 

To find a Veronica server (there are about eight of them in
the world) you must start gopher and find a menu item titled:
"Search titles in gopherspace using veronica/."  The top
level mother gopher menu at U of Minnesota will have this
under "Other Gopher and Information Servers/."  

The best Veronica server is the "Experimental Veronica query
interface" at U. of Nevada Reno (the original developers of
Veronica).  This server processes your search request by 
looking at all the other Veronica servers and reporting 
back from one of them.


 Words or Directories 

When querying Veronica, you can search for keywords in gopher
directories or in all gopher titles.  A directory search will
be less inclusive, but perhaps more fruitful, depending on
your needs.

A word of warning.  If you attempt to use Veronica during 
peak Internet traffic hours be prepared for the message:
"Too many connections--Try again soon."  This is a polite
message, but aggravating after about the tenth time.
During work hours, it is better to choose a foreign Veronica
server (Bergen, Cologn, Pisa) than one in the US. Sadly, 
everyone knows this.

 How Does It Work? 

From the "Search Gopherspace via Veronica" menu choose a
Veronica server.  A "words to search for" box opens.  Type
in your search term(s).  Note that you may use the boolean
operators AND, OR and NOT.  You also may use the * character
as a truncation wildcard.  Note that a space between search
words is treated as an AND.  For example, a search term like
"meat tofu" is the same as "meat AND tofu."  It will return
only titles with both "meat" and "tofu" in them.  

The search term "cat*" will return cats, catfish, catsup, etc.
Veronic is not case sensitive, so CAT, Cat and cat are the
same.

 Veronica Tricks 

There are several switches you can use with Veronica to 
affect the outcome.  Placing -m[number] after your search
word(s) will cause Veronica to return [number] of responses.
This is most useful in increasing the number of responses
from the standard 200 to a higher number.  For example, 
"cat* -m1000" will return 1000 gopher items containing the
word cat.

A -d[domain name] after your search word(s) will cause 
Veronica to look at gopher servers only in that domain.
For example, "cat* -d.edu" will cause Veronica to return
only gopher titles found at edu domain gopher servers.

 Jughead 

Ok.  If Veronica searches all gopherspace for you, what does
Jughead do?

Jughead is Veronica with her wings clipped.  Jughead servers
limit the amount of gopherspace to be searched by your 
queries, usually to the computers in one University or org-
anization.  That way the users of Jughead can focus their
searches in known, local databases.  For Jughead to be use-
ful to you, you have to have a local Jughead server (of which
there are many) or be particularly interested in the data-
bases served by one of the Jughead servers on the Internet.


 What's In A Name? 

The official Internet party line is that Veronica means:

Very Easy Rodent Oriented Net-wide Index to Computer Archives

and that Jughead (developed by programmer Rhett Jones) means:

Jonzy's Universal Gopher Hierarchy Excavation And Display

Nice mla's.  But not true.  The original Veronica programmers
modelled their work on the Archie ftp file archive program.
Hence Veronica, Archie's friend, and also hence Jughead.  
Watch for programs called Betty, Reggie or Moose ahead.


