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SURFPUNK Technical Journal 017
Date: Thu, 17 Dec 92 17:12:17 PST
Reply-To: <cocot@osc.versant.com>
Message-ID: <surfpunk-0017@SURFPUNK.Technical.Journal>
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From: cocot@osc.versant.com (Captain COCOT)
To: surfpunk@osc.versant.com (SURFPUNK Technical Journal)
Subject: [surfpunk-0017] GOPHER: Veronica: new gopher ferretting agents...
Keywords: surfpunk, gopher, veronica, indexing, browsing, searching
Veronica indexes gopher page titles.
I didn't find this incredibly useful for browsing -- it's slow, and
it doesn't really tell you what's out there.
It's more useful if you know what you're after, but it has to appear
in a title. I think this model works well for archie, where you are
searching for things by pretty fixed names, but I'm having some
qualms about why this isn't satisfying to me.
If it were fast, maybe I'd like it better.
See what you think.
Captain Cocot
ways to gopher:
gopher
telnet consultant.micro.umn.edu or telnet 134.84.132.4
telnet panda.uiowa.edu or telnet 128.255.63.234
telnet gdunix.gd.chalmers.se or 129.16.221.40 (SWEDISH)
telnet gopher.uiuc.edu or telnet 128.174.33.160
telnet gopher.unt.edu or telnet 129.120.1.42
telnet tolten.puc.cl or telnet 146.155.1.16 (CHILE)
telnet wsuaix.csc.wsu.edu (Login: wsuinfo)
telnet una.hh.lib.umich.edu or 141.211.190.102
telnet gopher.ora.com or telnet 140.186.65.25
to veronica:
gopher futique.scs.unr.edu 70
... or navigate to University of Nevada
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From: keith@cc.gatech.edu (Keith Edwards)
Subject: new gopher ferretting agents...
From: unr!barrie@uunet.UU.NET (Fred F Barrie)
Subject: VERONICA (Archie for GopherSpace)
Date: Thu, 17 Dec 1992 01:39:59 GMT
This is a new service that should help to relieve the
resource-discovery bottleneck in the rapidly-expanding gopher web. It
adds global indexing (by title keywords) to gopher's distributed
information model.
Introductory announcement follows:
...........................................................................
About the Veronica service
VERONICA: Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index to Computerized
Archives.
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-to-use 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, 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.
Please address comments to: gophadm@futique.scs.unr.edu
November 17, 1992
Steve Foster
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The SURFPUNK Technical Journal is a dangerous multinational hacker zine
originating near BARRNET in the fashionable western arm of the northern
California matrix. Quantum Californians appear in one of two states,
spin surf or spin punk. Undetected, we are both, or might be neither.
________________________________________________________________________
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Xanalogical archive access soon. Collect U S Commemoratives. They're fun.
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