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Cyhist Feb 07 1997 A
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Date: Fri, 7 Feb 1997 10:52:11 +0000
Reply-To: "CYHIST Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
Cyberspace" <CYHIST@SJUVM.STJOHNS.EDU>
Sender: "CYHIST Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
Cyberspace" <CYHIST@SJUVM.STJOHNS.EDU>
From: John Line <jml4@cus.cam.ac.uk>
Subject: CM> Re: First search engine?
In-Reply-To: <E0vsn1h-00026S-00@ursa.cus.cam.ac.uk> from "Automatic digest
processor" at Feb 7, 97 00:27:46 am
______________________________________________________________________
Community Memory: Discussion List on the History of Cyberspace ______________________________________________________________________
The discussion of web search engines prompts me to say "But what about veronica?", the search facility that was routinely indexing documents on gopher servers (description from menu onlys, not full text) "long before" the web technology had escaped from CERN.
The current veronica Frequently Asked Questions document at
gopher://gopher.scs.unr.edu:70/00/veronica/veronica-faq
is dated 13 Jan 1995, but has a copyright notice mentioning "1993,1994,1995"; a "How to Compose veronica Queries" document at
gopher://gopher.scs.unr.edu:70/00/veronica/how-to-query-veronica
is dated 23 June 1994.
Those documents quote figures such as 10 million items indexed from 5500 gopher servers (they'd been increasing in numbers "very rapidly", but nothing like WWW servers these days...) at June 1994. In WWW terms, veronica indexed the visible descriptions corresponding to links, and so entries could be for telnet (or tn3270) connections (e.g. to library catalogues) and CSO directory servers, in addition to text, image, sound and various other files (including as a relatively late addition, HTML documents).
I don't have copies of any really early news articles or documentation discussing veronica that might have pinned down its origins more precisely, but the Dec 92/Jan 93 issue (Vol 6 No 1) of the UIUCnet newsletter (a special issue "Exploring the Power of the Internet Gopher") includes a couple of paragraphs about veronica and notes "VERONICA is a relatively new service", which implies veronica got started in 1992. And very useful it was too, except that the handful of systems running the search engine were very often rejecting connections because they were overloaded (and the substantial disk requirements for holding the index served to limit growth in number of veronica sites).
John Line
PS In case you were wondering, veronica was an acronym for "very easy rodent-oriented net-wide index to computerized archives". Or more likely, the expansion was invented to fit the acronym, which seems to have mutated from uppercase to lowercase over the years.
--
John Line - Cambridge University Computing Service, Computer Laboratory,
New Museums Site, Pembroke Street, Cambridge CB2 3QG, England. Internet: jml4@cus.cam.ac.uk Phone: +44 1223 334708 FAX: +44 1223 334679
______________________________________________________________________
Reply-To: "CYHIST Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
Cyberspace" <CYHIST@SJUVM.STJOHNS.EDU>
Sender: "CYHIST Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
Cyberspace" <CYHIST@SJUVM.STJOHNS.EDU>
From: John Line <jml4@cus.cam.ac.uk>
Subject: CM> Re: First search engine?
In-Reply-To: <E0vsn1h-00026S-00@ursa.cus.cam.ac.uk> from "Automatic digest
processor" at Feb 7, 97 00:27:46 am
______________________________________________________________________
Community Memory: Discussion List on the History of Cyberspace ______________________________________________________________________
The discussion of web search engines prompts me to say "But what about veronica?", the search facility that was routinely indexing documents on gopher servers (description from menu onlys, not full text) "long before" the web technology had escaped from CERN.
The current veronica Frequently Asked Questions document at
gopher://gopher.scs.unr.edu:70/00/veronica/veronica-faq
is dated 13 Jan 1995, but has a copyright notice mentioning "1993,1994,1995"; a "How to Compose veronica Queries" document at
gopher://gopher.scs.unr.edu:70/00/veronica/how-to-query-veronica
is dated 23 June 1994.
Those documents quote figures such as 10 million items indexed from 5500 gopher servers (they'd been increasing in numbers "very rapidly", but nothing like WWW servers these days...) at June 1994. In WWW terms, veronica indexed the visible descriptions corresponding to links, and so entries could be for telnet (or tn3270) connections (e.g. to library catalogues) and CSO directory servers, in addition to text, image, sound and various other files (including as a relatively late addition, HTML documents).
I don't have copies of any really early news articles or documentation discussing veronica that might have pinned down its origins more precisely, but the Dec 92/Jan 93 issue (Vol 6 No 1) of the UIUCnet newsletter (a special issue "Exploring the Power of the Internet Gopher") includes a couple of paragraphs about veronica and notes "VERONICA is a relatively new service", which implies veronica got started in 1992. And very useful it was too, except that the handful of systems running the search engine were very often rejecting connections because they were overloaded (and the substantial disk requirements for holding the index served to limit growth in number of veronica sites).
John Line
PS In case you were wondering, veronica was an acronym for "very easy rodent-oriented net-wide index to computerized archives". Or more likely, the expansion was invented to fit the acronym, which seems to have mutated from uppercase to lowercase over the years.
--
John Line - Cambridge University Computing Service, Computer Laboratory,
New Museums Site, Pembroke Street, Cambridge CB2 3QG, England. Internet: jml4@cus.cam.ac.uk Phone: +44 1223 334708 FAX: +44 1223 334679
______________________________________________________________________
