1992

Veronica was developed at the University of Nevada in Reno in 1992. Veronica is a menu-oriented search engine for an internet service called Gopher, which was used until the mid 90s before being replaced by the WWW and search engines like Google. During the transition period from Gopher to World Wide Web Veronica was used with WWW forms. Today however, there are hardly any Gopher- or Veronica-servers remaining.
Veronica was the Gopherspace pendant to FTP’s Archie. Veronica is an acronym, meaning Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Netwide Index to Computerized Archives.

Veronica indexed all titles of files and directories of all Gopher servers, known to the Gopher of the University of Minnesota or respectively all Gopher servers which were referred to by this server. One serious advantage over the Archie search engine was that the titles were not restricted to file names, but they could also consist of whole sentences. Logical requests with “and”, “or” and “not” in combination with the search term were possible with Veronica as well.