The Gopher search engine released by Steven Foster and Fred Barrie in 1992 was Veronica.
Veronica was developed at the University of Nevada, Reno, and released in November 1992. It was built for Gopher, a menu-driven information system that was widely used before the Web became dominant. Rather than indexing full web pages, Veronica maintained a frequently updated database of menu-item names collected from thousands of Gopher servers.
Users could reach Veronica through many major Gopher menus and search its index for topics or resources. Its role was therefore closer to a directory-wide discovery tool than to a modern web crawler searching the text of every document.
The name was a playful reference to Veronica Lodge from Archie Comics. That also explains a frequent confusion: Archie was an earlier search tool for files on anonymous FTP servers, while Veronica searched Gopher menus. Another related tool, Jughead, was developed at the University of Utah and served as a separate Gopher search system.