"The archie server automatically updates the listing information from each site about once a month, ensuring users that the information they receive is reasonably timely, without imposing an undue load on the archive sites or network bandwidth."
Unfortunately the archie server at McGill is currently out of service. Other sites are: archie.ans.net (USA [NY]) archie.rutgers.edu (USA [NJ]) archie.sura.net (USA [MD]) archie.funet.fi (Finland/Mainland Europe) archie.au (Australia/New Zealand) archie.doc.ic.ac.uk (Great Britain/Ireland)
More information avaiable from: UNIX Support Group Computing Centre McGill University Room 200 Burnside Hall 805 Sherbrooke Street West Montreal, Quebec CANADA H3A 2K6 514/398-3709 peterd@cc.mcgill.ca
Internet Gopher
Gopher (or go-fer): someone who fetches necessary items from many locations.
Login as gopher after you telnet to consultant.micro.umn.edu and enjoy having a computer do all the work for you. Almost. Gopher is still in experimental mode at many gopherized sites. Still, it is one of the best ways to locate information on and in the Internet.
Besides archie, the gopher at consultant.micro.umn.edu includes fun and games, humor, libraries (including reference books such as the Hacker's Dictionary, Roget's 1911 Thesaurus, and the CIA World Fact Book), gateways to other US and foreign gophers, news, and gateways to other systems.
VERONICA: Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index to Computerized Archives.
Very new on the scene is VERONICA.
Here is some information from Steve Foster about it.
"Veronica offers a keyword search of most gopher-server menus in the entire gopher web. As Archie is to ftp archives, Veronica is to gopherspace. Unlike Archie, the search results can connect you directly to the data source. Imagine an Archie search that lets you select the data, not just the host sites, directly from a menu. Because Veronica is accessed through a gopher client, it is easy to use, and gives access to all types of data supported by the gopher protocol."
"Veronica was designed as a response to the problem of resource discovery in the rapidly-expanding gopher web. Frustrated comments in the net news- groups have recently reflected the need for such a service. Additional motivation came from the comments of naive gopher users, several of whom assumed that a simple-touse service would provide a means to find resources `without having to know where they are.'"