Current number of Gopher Servers

[Paul Kleeberg]

What is the current number of Gopher Servers? Better yet: Is there a method
I can use to look up that information whenever I need to know?

I thought I could find this information in the Gopher News Archive or in the
Gopher FAQ but I could not. The latest figures I found were for Jan '94
(3425 sites).

Thanks for your help.

Paul
Pa...@GAC.Edu

[Mark P. McCahill]

David Scott 614/466-0705 writes:
> >What is the current number of Gopher Servers?
> >Better yet: Is there a method
> >I can use to look up that information whenever I need to know?
>

> I sure hope to find the answer to that one myself!! <G> I've wondered for
> some time how folks find out how many gophers, how many www servers, etc
> there are that have been added in any given month. Surely, no one is
> tallying all that info by hand(!) :)
>

Ideally, the number of servers would be determined by looking at the
results of a VERONICA harvest. Since VERONICA does an exhaustive
traversal of gopherspace it would find everything (including servers that
are referenced by another server but not officially registerd).

From Steve Foster's talk at GopherCON '94 we know that the number of servers
that VERONICA finds is significantly large than the number of registered
servers. By the way, we register between 20 and 40 new servers each week here.

Matz.E...@gd.gu.se (Matz Engstrom) writes:
> Yes, I often use Washington & Lee's exellent gopher
> services, and they report all new gophers coming in,
> and the number is 4809 right now. Have a look at
>
> gopher://liberty.uc.wlu.edu:70/11/gophers/other

I wish I knew how Washington & Lee come up with there new gopher lists.
A quick look at there server (which IS really nice) didn't reveal if they
are working off the servers that are registered by us
(gop...@boombox.micro.umn.edu) and the EuroGopher folks (gop...@ebone.net)
or if they were dereving their information from a VERONICA harvest.

Mark P. McCahill gopherspace engineer
m...@boombox.micro.umn.edu University of Minnesota
612 625 1300 612 625 6817 (fax)

[David Scott 614/466-0705]

>What is the current number of Gopher Servers? Better yet: Is there a
method
>I can use to look up that information whenever I need to know?

I sure hope to find the answer to that one myself!! <G> I've wondered for
some time how folks find out how many gophers, how many www servers, etc
there are that have been added in any given month. Surely, no one is
tallying all that info by hand(!) :)

--Dave
acq_...@ohio.gov
dsc...@freenet.columbus.oh.us
/ / / / / / /

[Stephen C. Trier]

In article <940930082...@gdunix.gd.chalmers.se>,

Matz Engstrom <Matz.E...@gd.gu.se> wrote:
>Yes, I often use Washington & Lee's exellent gopher
>services, and they report all new gophers coming in,
>and the number is 4809 right now.

That's an excellent service. Be aware that the number is only a
lower bound. No system can count _everything_. :-)

Another question is how you define "server". Washington & Lee counts
any service offered on a seperate host-or-port as a server. By that
definition, gopher.cwru.edu is 7 servers. From a user perspective,
it's one server with many features.

A definition that is perhaps closer to the "user view" is used for the
Minnesota list of all gophers. There, a server is whatever its
sysadmin wishes to register. Minnesota currently counts 2046.

This isn't to say it's impossible to get a count, just a suggestion
that getting an accurate picture might require getting more than one
count.

I wonder how many servers Veronica has found?

Stephen