Wide Area Information Servers

Wide Area Information Servers or WAIS is a client-server text searching system that uses the ANSI Z39.50 protocol to search index databases on remote computers.The WAIS protocol and servers were primarily promoted by Thinking Machines Corporation of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Thinking Machines produced a WAIS server which ran on their CM-1 and CM-5 supercomputers. WAIS clients existed for various operating systems including Windows, Macintosh and UNIX.With the advent of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s and the bankruptcy of Thinking Machines in 1995, the primitive interface of the WAIS system quickly gave way to Web based search engines. There are few WAIS servers in existence on the Internet today.
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See WAIS.

<networking, information science> (WAIS) A distributed information retrieval system. WAIS is supported by Apple Computer, Thinking Machines and Dow Jones. Clients are able to retrieve documents using keywords. The search returns a list of documents, ranked according to the frequency of occurrence of the keyword(s) used in the search. The client can retrieve text or multimedia documents stored on the server. WAIS offers simple natural language input, indexed searching for fast retrieval, and a "relevance feedback" mechanism which allows the results of initial searches to influence future searches. It uses the ANSI Z39.50 service. Public domain implementations are available.
Other information retrieval systems include archie, Gopher, Prospero, and World-Wide Web.
Usenet newsgroup: news:comp.infosystems.wais.
Telnet.
(1995-03-13)