Searchable Indexes: LISTEN NOW!

Nathan Torkington (Nathan.Torkington@vuw.ac.nz)
Thu, 1 Jul 1993 12:16:18 +1200


At this year's Gophercon I boldly claimed that the proliferation of
names for services introduced unnecessary confusion among new users.
This hit the floor with a dull thud; folks *like* "Veronica". But
already there are brochures put out by self-styled Netexpert trainers
that speak as if Veronica is a separate entity that exists outside of
Gopherspace. From the perspective of rationality I claim that we don't
need yet another proper noun-denominated net service; call it "WWW
master index". From the perspective of marketing, a cute name might give
it visibility so as to rival Veronica.

Couple more Veronica notes, and I'll shut up:

Veronica isn't always reliable. The harvest misses sites sometimes,
and is only done every two weeks currently. The idea of harvesting
catalogs provided by the server, rather than walking the tree, should
help a lot. Veronica doesn't do that yet; an opportunity for the Web to
do it right the first time.

Another bit of experience: the indexer shouldn't drop sites it can't
connect to. Carry their data until the next harvest. People have
complained about their titles disappearing from the index. (This has
been fixed in Veronica.)

Distribution of the Veronica database is currently accomplished by
FTPing the entire database (> 400M) from the master site. At some point
distributed updates will be essential.

/Rich Wiggins, Gopher Coordinator, Michigan State U

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
...
With all these in mind, and continuing the archie/veronica/jughead
tradition, allow me to suggest ``Josie and the Pussycats'' as a name for
this service.

Nat