ARCHIVED: What are veronica and jughead, and how do they compare?

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Veronica and jughead are programs for searching Gopher servers. Veronica is allegedly short for "Very Easy, Rodent-Oriented, Net-wide Index to Computerized Archives", while jughead is supposed to be an acronym of "Jonzy's Universal Gopher Hierarchy Excavation And Display". The names are also based on characters from Archie Comics, in connection with Archie, a search engine for anonymous FTP.

The difference between veronica and jughead is primarily a matter of scale. Veronica servers seek to catalog as much of Gopher-space as possible, frequently conferring with one another to keep themselves up to date. Jughead servers, on the other hand, are more local. Each administrator may set up a jughead server for his or her Gopher site, which enables searches for only a specific part of Gopher-space. Veronica is more comprehensive, but tends to be slower. Neither engine does full-text searches as they catalog only titles and directories.

Veronica, which was developed at the University of Nevada at Reno, is described at the following address:

  gopher://gopher.scs.unr.edu:70/11/veronica

Jughead, which was developed by Rhett "Jonzy" Jones at the University of Utah, is described at the following address:

  gopher://gopher.utah.edu/11/Search%20menu%20titles%20using%20jughead

As the World Wide Web has replaced Gopher as the information delivery system of choice on the Internet, the relevance of Gopher searching tools like veronica and jughead has diminished. However, as they are accessible by web browsers such as Netscape Navigator and Lynx, they continue to be useful for digging through the Gopher servers that remain.