Definitions for teachers by teachers

Gopher

Developed at the University of Minnesota (the program is named for the school's non-racially stereotyping mascot), Gopher was a popular way to organize files for the Internet. Two Gopher search engines, Veronica and Jughead, were developed to search the indexes of files on the Internet. Gopher is seldom used much as it represents an earlier attempt at organizing the contents of the Internet. Web Search Engines have replaced much of Gopher's functionality.

How would I use Gopher? The question may not be so much "How", as "Why?" While the vast majority of web current web documents can be accessed web search engines, there are still large depositories of older documents that may be of interest to researchers still accessible via Gopher. Several comprehensive Gopher sites still exist. Try GOPHER JEWELS and Yahoo's GOPHER page.

by Paul Smith

GOPHER

Gopher is a text-based, menu-driven information retrieval system for the Internet. It allows you to search databases for keywords or subjects. Web browsers such as Netscape and Internet Explorer have been replacing Gopher for document retrieval. An advantage to searching with Gopher is that you can read directly from the servers without needing to copy or save the files to your system first. Gopher files do not use HTML format and do not provide much beyond a basic text presentation of information.

Gopher was developed at the University of Minnesota. Golden Gopher is the name of the school mascot.

CNET Glossary - http://coverage.cnet.com/Resources/Info/Glossary/

IBM Dictionary of Computing - http://www.networking.ibm.com/nsg/Gatmst11.htm

by Gloria Henke

NetHandbook Glossary | NetHandbook Home page