For a brief time in the early 1990s, the Gopher protocol overshadowed the World Wide Web in popularity. Gopher was a network of interconnected, hierarchical menus on the Internet that allowed users to navigate between sites, read text files, and download binary files conveniently.
When the number of Gopher sites exploded, users needed a way to search through them. Enter [[xref:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veronica_%28computer%29 |Veronica|Veronica]], a comic book-inspired play on the earlier search-related name Archie. It searched "Gopherspace," as seen here in a Web browser that supported the now-obsolete protocol.