INFORMATION SEARCHING

Gopher is one of information systems on the Internet. It was developed in 1991 at the University of Minnesota. Gopher was the first system that enables transparent searching on different sites through menus.

Gopher is supported by many Internet servers. It contains specialized information that cannot be find on web servers. Like FTP servers Gopher too enables us to view information during the session or we can download them and view them of-line.

All Gopher pages on more then 5000 Gopher servers makes Gopherspace. Information are accessible through menus with files and folders. Folders are named "Gopher holes".

USING GOPHER

Once upon the time we needed special programs for retrieving data from Gopher servers. Today majority of Internet browsers know how to access and explore Gopherspace.

1.) USING GOPHER FROM WITHIN WEB BROWSERS

Only thing we need to do in the web browser is to change the protocol. Default protocol in web browser is "http://" followed by computer name. If we type "gopher://" followed by computer name that runs Gopher server we can view Gopher information.

Gopher servers:

University of South California (gopher://cwis.usc.edu)
University of Minnesota (gopher://gopher.micro.umn.edu)
Wiretap Gopher (gopher://wiretap.spies.com)

2.) USING GOPHER BROWSERS

Majority of Gopher browsers can be found at the public FTP (anonymous access) from at the University of Minnesota (ftp://boombox.micro.umn.edu/pub/gopher)

3.) SEARCHING IN GOPHERSPACE

For searching the information in gopher world we can use special tools like Veronica and Jughead. Veronica has a database of all information in Gopher world

To retrieve the information we first connect to the Gopher server and then we chose connection to the Gopher searcher.