VeronicaVeronica is a program that searches Gopher menu entries to match user-supplied search strings to the contents of those entries. Veronica can search all menu entries to examine file and directory names, or only menu directory entries to examine only directory names. According to some sources, in fact, Veronica is an acronym that stands for "Very Easy Rodent Oriented Net-wide Index to Computerized Archives;" we're pretty sure this is apocryphal, but we like it anyway.
If you find analogies helpful, try this one for Veronica: Veronica is to Gopher as search engines are to the Web. That is, Veronica acts as a search tool for the vast collection of Gopher information on the Internet known to the cognoscenti as Gopherspace. What Veronica really does is to search menu entries in Gopher menus everywhere (or at least on every Gopher server the Veronica program can access) to look for the search strings that users supply.
You'll find Veronica hangs out right within the Gopher menus on your client software, rather than your having to run it as a separate application. You'll recognize her haunts when you see a string like
4. Search titles in Gopherspace using veronica/
Sometimes, however, Veronica shows up under the same heading as the list of Gopher servers you find at the end of most Gopher menus, under a menu entry like:
5. Other Gopher and Information Servers
Once you locate and select the right menu entry, you'll be ready to use Veronica. If you place this entry into your personal bookmark list by using the add (a) command, you'll be able to get back to it at any time by using the view (v) command, which displays a menu of your bookmarks.
The best thing about Veronica is also the worst thing about Veronica: It behaves just like Gopher, and uses the same menus and display conventions. Veronica is capable of some interesting search operations by combining multiple strings in a single query--for instance, "TCP/IP" and "FAQ", you could find all menus that relate to FAQs with TCP/IP in their titles.
Better yet, Veronica supports Boolean operations on search strings, including and, or, and not. This means you can ask Veronica to find menu entries where both words are present (word1 and word2), where only one word is present but not both [(word1 and not word2) or (word2 and not word1)].
To round out its capabilities, Veronica also supports asterisk (*) as a wildcard character, so you can match substrings within words. For example, you could tell Veronica to look for fondle, fondue, and fondness by telling it to look for the string "fond*." Actually you could find any menu entry with the consecutive letters fond by telling Veronica to look for the string "*fond*".