*** Veronica-2 Help: How to search Veronica-2 contains listings of selectors and menu titles for many places in Gopherspace. (IT'S NOT A FULL TEXT SEARCH -- neither was the original Veronica.) This means anything that's a gopher menu title or in a gopher menu title, as well as the selectors that fetch them, is fair game. Veronica-2 runs on the in-house Textil search system, which implements stemming, generalization and sophisticated sorting logic. Still, this is no cure for a bad search query. Typically, a few well-considered keywords will do the trick. Any selector containing the keyword(s), or any display string that contains the keyword(s), will be returned. The search is case insensitive. Textil implements stemming support, so pieces of words can also match. Veronica-2 returns 30 matches per page. The "best" matches are sorted to the top, typically those with the most keyword hits. There is no specific provision for Boolean logic; the search server takes care of that for you. You don't need AND or OR. Things you SHOULD NOT search for: * Common terms. Queries that require huge amounts of traversal in the database (invariably a query with a large number of very common terms) will actually get edited down to more specific keywords for you in order to keep things humming along and give you faster response time. However, the search engine may not have chosen the words you want to keep -- best to search smart to begin with. * Punctuation marks are generally not helpful. For example, do NOT use * hyphens * wildcards (like %, _, * and ?) * slashes These will be filtered, since they are not indexed. The old Veronica-ism of using wildcards is NOT NECESSARY! DON'T USE THEM! If you're looking for something like "hyde-white", looking for "hyde white" will usually have the intended effect. * Remember: Boolean logic terms are not needed! * Remember: Veronica-2 is NOT A FULL TEXT SEARCH. Specific phrases WITHIN a document are not indexed, and the CONTENT of a document is not indexed either! Things you SHOULD search for: * Parts of words are more helpful than a whole word if you don't know the exact wording of what you're after. For example, 'busses' gets much more restrictive matches than 'bus' (but you can always enter a search for 'busses' if that's specifically what you want, of course). While there is stemming support in the searcher, it might not help you. * Do try to spell correctly; because of previous problems with it (in particular since it only worked well for English), there is no more phonetic matching technology in this version. Spelling does count! .