Source: Telecommunications, April 1993 v27 n4 p33(1). Title: On the trail of the Internet Gopher. (Technical Update) (Technical) Author: Mark P. McCahill Abstract: The Internet Gopher is a protocol that facilitates creating distributed information systems and arranging access on local networks as well as on the Internet. Gopher makes it easy to navigate on the Internet, allowing non-technical users to find and access various sorts of resources. Internet Gopher client software provides users with a virtual information matrix, or 'gopherspace,' so that users can browse through hierarchical menus, or alternatively, search by submitting queries to full-text search engines. There were more than 500 Gopher servers on the Internet as of Dec 1992, and more than one million items were available via these servers. Gopher software is available for anonymous ftp from boombox.micro.umn.edu in the pub/gopher directory. Versions are available for various platforms including Apple Macintosh, PC, NeXT, X Windows, VMS, VM/CMS and VT-100 terminals. The University of Nevada has developed a service called VERONICA (very easy rodent-oriented net-wide index to computerized archives), which is a searchable index of items on gopher servers. Subjects: Computer networks - Services Products: Internet - Services Business Collection: 70Z0638 Electronic Collection: A13749204 RN: A13749204 Full Text COPYRIGHT Horizon House Publications Inc. 1993 Internet Gopher is a simple protocol for building distributed information systems and organizing access to resources on local networks as well as on the Internet. Gopher is designed to make navigating the Internet and accessing distributed resources easy for novice and non-technical users. Because novice users access information in different ways (by browsing or by submitting search requests), Gopher combines seamless browsing across multiple servers and full-text searching functions. The Internet Gopher client software presents users with a virtual information matrix (gopherspace) that they can navigate by browsing a hierarchical arrangement of items, or search by submitting queries to full-text search engines. For browsing in gopherspace, the gopher client software presents the user with lists of items from which the user selects an item of interest, typically by pointing and clicking with a mouse. For instance, at the University of Minnesota, a user might find a salmon recipe by looking in the fun and games directory for the recipes directory that contains a seafood directory. Alternatively, the user can select an option called "search lots of places" at the University of Minnesota. When this search option is selected, the user is prompted by the gopher client software for a key word (salmon) and a full-text search is done by the server. The result of the search is a list of items that matches the search criteria. While searching for recipes is fun, Internet Gopher has serious applications: at the University of Minnesota it is possible to search through a technical information Q&A data base of over 7000 items about microcomputers and workstations, which allows microcomputer users to research possible causes of hardware and software problems easily. Gopher is also used to post job opportunities and make text data bases easily accessible at sites around the world. Gopher is also used to distribute news: the University of Minnesota campus newspaper, the Minnesota Daily, is available on-line in full-text searchable format, as are weather reports for the entire US. One of Gopher's strengths is that information at a server in Italy can easily be referenced by a server in Indiana, and geographically distributed servers are accessed transparently by the user. How is this done? A Gopher client is configured with the address of a single Gopher server. When the client is launched, it contacts this server for an initial list of items to display to the user. Each item has a type associated with it so that the client software can differentiate between documents, directories, search engines, sounds, etc. The type descriptor also makes it easy to add functionality to the Gopher protocol by defining new types. Each item also has a name (to be displayed to the user), a selector string (to be sent to a server to get the contents of the item), and the port and name of the machine on which the item resides. The machine name and port can easily be used to refer to other Gopher servers; this makes it easy to construct links (pointers) to items that reside on other servers. These links can refer to individual documents, search engines, or directories (collections of items). Because there are gateways from Gopher to other services, Gopher clients can transparently access information on non-Gopher servers including WAIS, Archie, file transfer protocol (ftp), and USENET news. The Gopher gateway to Archie translates ftp sites listed by Archie into items that a Gopher client can access directly through the Gopher-to-ftp gateway; this makes finding and fetching items via anonymous ftp seamless with a Gopher client. As of December 1992, there are over 500 Gopher servers on the Internet and over one million items available on these servers. This growth created the demand for a way of searching for items across all of the gopher servers. The University of Nevada has developed a service called VERONICA (very easy rodent-oriented net-wide index to computerized archives), which is a searchable index of item names for most of the gopher servers. The addition of VERONICA to the Internet Gopher's bag of tricks makes it even easier to find what one is looking for. Exact measures of Gopher usage are difficult since the servers are so widely distributed. The only way of exactly measuring usage would be to look at all the servers simultaneously, and this is clearly impractical. Still, it is interesting to know that between November 2 and December 7, 1992, the two main gopher servers at the University of Minnesota saw requests from 35,000 different hosts and handled just over one million transactions. Gopher software is available for anonymous ftp from boombox.micro. umn.edu in the pub/gopher directory. (Clients: Macintosh, PC, NeXT, X Windows, VMS, VM/CMS, and VT-100 terminal; servers: Unix, NeXT, Macintosh, VMS, VM/CMS, and MVS.) Gopher is discussed on the Gopher-news mailing list (send subscription requests to gopher-news-request@ boombox.micro.umn.edu) as well as on the USENET newsgroup comp.infosystems.gopher. For a quick look at gopherspace, you can telnet to consultant.micro.umn.edu and log in as gopher; for extended visits to gopher-space you will probably want to run a Gopher client on your own machine. -- End -- .