Editing Wide area information server (section)

==WAIS and Gopher==
Public WAIS is often used as a full-text [[Search engine (computing)|search engine]] for individual [[Internet Gopher]] servers, supplementing the popular [[Veronica (search engine)|Veronica]] system which only searches the menu titles of Gopher sites. WAIS and Gopher share the [[World Wide Web]]'s client–server architecture and a certain amount of its functionality. The WAIS protocol is influenced largely by the z39.50 protocol designed for networking library catalogs. It allows a text-based search, and retrieval following a search. Gopher provides a free text search mechanism, but principally uses menus. A menu is a list of titles, from which the user may pick one. While [[Gopher Space]] is a web containing many loops, the menu system gives the user the impression of a tree.<ref name="ReferenceA">Berners-Lee, Tim. "The World-Wide Web". ''The New Media Reader''. The MIT Press.</ref><ref>{{Cite book|title=Computer Applications In Business|last=Parameswaran|publisher=S. Chand Publisher|year=2008|isbn=978-8121912006|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=og0rDAAAQBAJ&q=Gopher+Space|pages=198}}</ref>

The Web's data model is similar to the gopher model, except that menus are generalized to hypertext documents. In both cases, simple file servers generate the menus or hypertext directly from the file structure of a server. The Web's hypertext model permits the author more freedom to communicate the options available to the reader, as it can include headings and various forms of list structure.<ref name="ReferenceA"/>