Wide Area Information Server is the oldest and by now obsolete search system for information on the internet. Before starting a full text search with the actual key words, you have to select the data sources to be searched from a long list of databases and document collections.
A network publishing system designed to help users find information over a computer network. WAIS software has four main components: the client, the server, the database, and the protocol. Discussed in RFC 1625.
Software that is used to index large text files in servers. On the client side, it finds and retrieves documents in databases, based on user defined words.
Systems for searching huge distributed database servers across a network, usually the Internet. WAIS allows you to perform a keyword search; it is analogous to an index, whereas Gopher, which is sometimes used as a complement to WAIS, is analogous to a table of contents.
WAIS is a database technology that lets Internet users search through the actual contents of documents stored on WAIS servers, rather than searching for file names or menu entries. Think of WAIS as the index of a book, rather than the table of contents.
(WAIS) Service for searching network databases.
Wide Area Information Servers or WAIS is a distributed text searching system that uses the protocol standard ANSI Z39.50 to search index databases on remote computers. The WAIS protocol and servers were primarily evangelized by Thinking Machines Corporation of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Thinking Machines produced a WAIS server which ran on their CM-1 and CM-5 supercomputers.