Your Internet Consultant - The FAQs of Life Online

7.7. How does Veronica work with Gopher?

When you think about this design, one thing stands out: a program can ask a server what information it has and save it into a file so that you can look at it later. Multiply this by the number of possible menus on a server and multiply the result by the number of servers on the Internet, and you have an idea of how the Veronica system works. Fortunately, the system doesn't actually chat with each of the thousands of servers for each of the searches you make! Instead, there are a small number of Veronica servers that actually collect the tons of information out there in Gopherspace, and then make that database available for anyone who is searching for information.

The benefit of this is that with Veronica, you can easily narrow in on only the information you're interested in.

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