Veronica stands for Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Network wide Index to Computerized Archives.
The software was developed specifically to search gopher space.
Gopher was the precursor to the World Wide Web and was named after the mascot of the University of Minnesota, the place it was developed.
Veronica and another early search engine, Jughead, were used to search Gopher the same way modern search engines are used to search the web.
