GopherVista

Continuing with our gopher madness, next up we have GopherVista.  And this is everything I had hoped it would be when I first learned about this project.  I had joked to another friend that it’d be cool to crawl and feed the indexer data in a manner that could basically bring AltaVista back to life.  And we laughed, and I had my utzoo search and that was that.

Except it wasn’t.

However, across the internet, Ben didn’t hear any naysay about limitations or anything to get in the way, and went ahead and wrote a crawler in go, kept the results in a sane name/db order for later sanitisation in and out of AltaVista, and after an aggressive gopher port scan of the internet, he created GopherVista, an index of the gopher-verse, running on Windows 98.

No, really, you read that right, GopherVista backends on Windows 98!

Read all about the creation of GopherVista over a Ben’s blog blog.benjojo.co.uk.

GopherVista

Keep in mind that this is a search engine, not a proxy, so it’s best to use something like Internet Explorer 4, or an ancient Netscape that supports both HTTP 1.1 & Gopher.

I have to also say, that something like this is far more cooler, and better thought out than my utzoo hack, and I’m just happy to have inspired him, but now I really want to re-think my setup, and of course index all the things….

7 thoughts on “GopherVista

  1. Hi sorry for asking but how do you actually gopher page?
    I have gopher IIS 1 server on Windows NT 3.51 but the onlything it does is it serves a directory listing (is there any index file which I have to write to have proper gopher experience?)

    Thanks for Anwsering and Best Regards

    • I imagine it should be in the server resource kit, or the documentation for IIS .. Oddly enough, I’ve never actually setup gopher on NT, it was installed in the installation, and IIS 4.0 removed it.

    • I just read Ben’s Blog post. Holy shit, this is amazing! I really should get into gopher. But then again, I already have too much on my plate. (I haven’t forgotten about our pet project).

      • Yeah, it really is amazing! It’s everything the utzoo thing should have been, but it also shows that if you feed it controlled data, and use something more intelligent to alter the stream, you can have it index pretty much anything….

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