Surfing the Internet | Page 5

load on the archive sites
or network bandwidth."

Unfortunately the archie server at McGill is currently out of service.
Other sites are:
archie.ans.net (USA [NY])
archie.rutgers.edu (USA [NJ])
archie.sura.net (USA [MD])
archie.funet.fi (Finland/Mainland Europe)
archie.au (Australia/New Zealand)
archie.doc.ic.ac.uk (Great Britain/Ireland)

More information avaiable from:
UNIX Support Group
Computing Centre
McGill University
Room 200
Burnside Hall
805 Sherbrooke Street West
Montreal, Quebec CANADA H3A 2K6
514/398-3709
[email protected]


Internet Gopher
Gopher (or go-fer): someone who fetches necessary items from many locations.

Login as gopher after you telnet to consultant.micro.umn.edu and enjoy
having a computer do all the work for you. Almost. Gopher is still in
experimental mode at many gopherized sites. Still, it is one of the best
ways to locate information on and in the Internet.

Besides archie, the gopher at consultant.micro.umn.edu includes fun and
games, humor, libraries (including reference books such as the Hacker's
Dictionary, Roget's 1911 Thesaurus, and the CIA World Fact Book), gateways
to other US and foreign gophers, news, and gateways to other systems.

VERONICA: Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index to Computerized Archives.

Very new on the scene is VERONICA.
Here is some information from Steve Foster about it.

"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.
Unlike Archie, the search results can connect you directly to the data source.
Imagine an Archie search that lets you select the data, not just the host
sites, directly from a menu. 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-touse 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 (consultant.micro.umn.edu), 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."