But what if you want to know more about a particular subject and don't know where, or even if, that information is located in Gopherspace? That's where the handy search tool Veronica comes in.

Quick & Valuable.

Veronica , an acronym for Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Netwide Index to Computer Archives, is a quick and valuable way to search Gopher by keyword. Steve Foster and Fred Barrie at the University of Nevada-Reno developed the program in 1992 after reading in Usenet newsgroups about frustrations in trying to locate resources in a quickly growing medium.

The basic idea behind Veronica is simple. Veronica searches through the hundreds of thousands of Gopher menu items, collects what's there, and returns an index of combined menus. Assume, for example, you are interested in ice hockey. You type in the keyword hockey and Veronica will return hundreds of documents located throughout the Internet—hockey Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs), tips for hockey players, downloadable video files of Wayne Gretzky, and more.

Veronica follows the principles of a Boolean search—that is, you can use such connectors as "AND," "OR," and "NOT" to combine words or strings of words. For instance, typing in the keyword health turns up more than 28,000 items. To narrow the search, you can type health and law and Veronica will compile a list of Gopher menu items that contain both of those words. On the other hand, you can broaden a search by using the connector "OR." A search for "Shakespeare or Gabriel Garcia Marquez" will turn up listings relating to either author.

Typing specific keywords will help Veronica narrow your search for information on the Internet.

Veronica is valuable because the Internet has no central table of contents or comprehensive listing of documents. No one individual, organization, or computer controls the Internet, and its resources are spread throughout cyberspace. With Veronica, in a few seconds or minutes you can search through millions of titles and turn up information that's directly related to what you're looking for.

Not Foolproof.

But Veronica isn't foolproof, and here's why. Veronica searches Gopher menu (and sub-menu) items, not the entire files contained on the Gopher servers themselves. It's as if you wanted to search back issues of The Los Angeles Times for articles on Bosnia, and the search turned up every article that contained the word "Bosnia" in the headline. Although you're sure to find plenty of useful information, you'd miss stories such as "Muslims, Croats Declare Truce." Likewise, if you were to use Veronica to search for topics related to forestry, and you used "forestry" as your keyword—a logical choice—you might miss articles contained under the Gopher heading "Moratorium on New Logging Licenses."

Another drawback is that because of the overwhelming number of documents in Gopherspace, certain keywords are marked and Veronica will not even try to use them. Suppose you want to know about Internet service providers. If you simply type internet, you'll likely receive the message that there are too many hits and you need to narrow your search. Even worse, you may get the message that there are too many connections and you'll need to try again later.

Furthermore, you may find that what looks at first to be a narrow keyword will turn up more listings than you can weed through, and the Gopher menu choices may be ambiguous. Suppose you want to find out if any newspapers are being published on Gopher sites. Type in the keyword newspaper and you'll turn up more than 1,000 items, including listings that do not give you the information you need immediately, such as Newspaper Abstracts (which newspaper?) and Newspaper (which returned an error message when we tried to open it). But even with these limitations, Veronica is still a valuable tool. Now that you know how it works, how do you go about using it?

Getting There.

One of the quickest ways to use Veronica is through a shell account. Although accessing Veronica through a shell account is not exciting graphically, it takes you right where you want to go, and all you need to do is type commands at your Unix prompt. Most Internet service providers provide access to some sort of Gopher menu system, and at the Unix prompt you simply type gopher to get to that menu. For example, with Internet access provider Rocky Mountain Internet Inc., typing gopher will take users to choices for information about Gopher, discussion groups, fun and games, and—more important for our purposes—a choice for Other Gopher And Information Servers. Clicking on that opens another menu, and one of those choices is Search Titles In Gopherspace Using Veronica.

You also can go directly to Gopher servers that will connect you with Veronica. Take, for example, the Gopher server at Interpath. At your Unix prompt, type gopher gopher.interpath.net. The Gopher menu that pops up has Search Tools, and typing in the number of that selection will take you directly to a menu choice for Search Gopherspace Using Veronica.

Then, once you've found this command, you'll see more menu entries associated with Veronica. They'll look something like this: Find Gopherspace Directories By Title Word(s) Via NYSERNet, Find Gopherspace Directories By Title Word(s) Via PSINet, Find Gopherspace Directories By Title Word(s) Via UNAM, etc. They all turn up similar results, so the best plan of attack is to try one until you get in.

Your Online Service.

You also can use Veronica if you have access to a commercial online service. The commercial online services have blossomed in the past few years in part because of their easy-to-use graphical interfaces, and they've extended that ease-of-use to their Internet areas. To use Veronica on America Online (AOL), for example, go to AOL's Internet section and click on the Gopher & WAIS icon. From there, the Search icon pulls up the Veronica search service screen.

Prodigy also lets you use Veronica, and although accessing it is a bit more complicated with Prodigy than with AOL, you'll get the hang of it after you've done it once. First, go to the Prodigy Web browser. Then, type in a Gopher address at the URL— gopher:// gopher.interpath.net works nicely. From there, it's the same principle as using a shell account, but instead of typing the number of the menu listing for Search Gopherspace Using Veronica, you just click on it. CompuServe also lets you access Gopher and Veronica the same way—just open your CompuServe Web browser and type in a Gopher address.

The third way to use Veronica is through a SLIP/PPP account, which has become an extremely popular entrance ramp to the Internet. (You can read more about SLIP/PPP in the "Getting Connected" section of this issue.) Because of the large number of Internet interfaces for SLIP/PPP accounts out there—Spry's Internet in a Box and Net-Manager's Internet Chameleon to name two—we can't describe all of them, but we'll give you a brief rundown of one.

If you're dialing into a SLIP/PPP account with Trumpet Winsock, chances are good you're using a Gopher interface such as WSGopher. Using Veronica with this program is similar to using Veronica via a dial-up account; the main difference is that you click on menu listings instead of typing their numbers. You click on the Gopher icon to call up a menu of choices—information about Gopher, computer information, discussion groups, and more. Click on Other Gopher And Information Servers and you'll see a choice for searching Gophers with Veronica.

Two Examples.

Now that you have a basic understanding of how Veronica works and where to find it, let's put it to the test with two examples. In the first case, we access Veronica through a shell account and choose to search Gopher via NYSERNet. We type in the keyword taxes, which turns up 978 listings—too many to sort through. So we return and type property and taxes, which turns up six items that contain both the words "property" and "taxes," including the provocative listing "Should Property Taxes Subsidize Automobile Usage?"

In the second case, we log on to AOL, go to the Veronica function in the method described above, and type in the keyword stocks. Once again we turn up too many listings to browse, so we return and narrow the search with the keywords stocks and computing, which calls up a more manageable list of six Gopher menu listings. From here, we can look at high performance computing stocks from the previous year.

One final note before you head off into Gopherspace with Veronica in your toolkit. Even if you've chosen your keywords accurately, you may have trouble getting results, and, unfortunately, it may be out of your control. Because Veronica is still one of the best ways to explore Gopherspace, it is used by an increasing number of people. Old Internet pros lament the fact that it used to take them just a few seconds to conduct a Veronica search; now they often run into "busy signals." If you don't get through with Veronica on your first try, don't give up—the results will be worth it.

by Heidi Anderson