What is WAIS?

In Summary:

WAIS is an Internet search tool that has the capability of searching many databases at one time. The databases to be searched can be determined by the user. When WAIS completes a search, it is actually searching an index of the database. A WAIS database index is created by a person.

WAIS retrieves all items from the chosen databases that contain any of the words in the search phrase, provided that the words in the search term appear in the indexes of the selected databases. A relevancy ranking is assigned to each retrieved item to help the user determine which items may be most useful. WAIS can be accessed via telnet, Gopher or a WAIS client program, and increasingly WAIS indexed databases are accessible through the World Wide Web.