Veronica

~ the obituary ~

The first tool that searched the internet was called Archie, short for archive, and it read the file listings of public FTP servers. The joke got out of hand from there. When two people at the University of Nevada, Reno built the equivalent for Gopher in November 1992, they named it Veronica after Veronica Lodge, and somebody at the University of Utah then wrote a third one and called it Jughead. An entire generation of internet infrastructure is named after an American comic that most of the world had never read.

Steven Foster and Fred Barrie built something that sounds small and was not. Gopher organized the internet as menus, and a menu item was a line of text with a server and a path behind it. Veronica walked out across thousands of those servers, collected every menu line it could reach, and put the lot in one searchable database. From most major Gopher menus there was an entry that let you query it. One box, and behind the box was more or less everything that had bothered to publish itself.

The backronym came later and it is the funniest thing in this file: Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index to Computer Archives. Somebody worked backward from a name they had already picked, hit the word rodent, and shipped it anyway.

By the time I had a modem in 1998 none of this was reachable. Gopher was gone from the machines people actually used, and a search was a text box on a web page that had read the documents themselves. Veronica belongs to the couple of years before that, and it works differently from anything I ever typed into. It could tell you a file called turkish-grammar.txt existed on a server in Utah. It could not tell you whether that file was any good, because it had never opened it.

~ the case file ~

~ searching the labels ~

This is the part that dates it. Veronica indexed titles, so the quality of your search was decided entirely by whether a stranger had named their menu entry sensibly. Somebody who wrote a clear label was findable. Somebody who wrote "misc" or "stuff2" had published into a void, no matter what was in there.

That worked because the internet was still made mostly of institutions, and institutions name things. A university department putting its course catalog on a Gopher server labels it the course catalog. The assumption held until the population changed, and once anybody could publish, the labels stopped being reliable and full-text indexing became the only option that made sense. Gopher's own built-in search had the same limit, which is why some sites bolted WAIS onto it as the engine that would actually read the contents.

~ what the license did ~

In February 1993 the University of Minnesota, which had written Gopher, announced it would charge for-profit users a licensing fee to run its server software. Nonprofits and schools stayed free, and browsing stayed free, but companies were going to be billed by size. The team followed it up in March with a letter about budget pressure, which read exactly like a letter about budget pressure.

The fee was probably survivable. What was not survivable was the question it put in people's heads, which was whether an independent implementation might get billed later too. CERN answered that question for the web on 30 April 1993 by putting the whole thing in the public domain. Anybody weighing up which protocol to build on had one option that came with an invoice and one that came with a disclaimer of ownership, and the traffic moved within a year. Veronica did not lose to a better search engine. It lost to the disappearance of the thing it searched.

~ what is still running ~

The original database was already unreachable by 1999 and there is no shutdown date to put here, only the year and the reasons around it. Local Veronica installations lingered on individual servers for a while afterward, doing the same job across a much smaller space.

A full rewrite called Veronica-2 exists and is still indexing, run off Floodgap, which is also where most of the surviving Gopher traffic goes. That means the search engine outlived the internet it was written for, and it is now a working index of a network kept alive on purpose by a few hundred people. The original answered questions about a place where everything was. The rewrite answers questions about a place people chose to go back to.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »