Gopher

What Does Gopher Mean?

Gopher is an application-layer protocol that provides the ability to extract and view Web documents stored on remote Web servers. Gopher was conceived in 1991 as one of the Internet’s first data/file access protocols to run on top of a TCP/IP network. It was developed at University of Minnesota and is named after the school's mascot.

Techopedia Explains Gopher

Gopher was designed to access a Web server or database via the Internet. It requires that files be stored in a menu-style hierarchy on a Gopher server that is accessible through a Gopher-enabled client browser and/or directly. It initially supported only text-based file/document access but later came to support some image formats such as GIF and JPEG.

Gopher was succeeded by the HTTP protocol and now has very few implementations. Gopher-based databases, servers or websites can be accessed through two search engines: Veronica and Jughead.