This FAQ follows the RFC1153 recommendations for message digests and thus should easily be viewed by newsreaders that understand message digests. WAIS is a networked information retrieval system. Client applications are able to retrieve text or multimedia documents stored on the servers.
Client applications request documents using keywords.
Servers search a full text index for the documents and return a list of documents containing the keyword. The client may then request the server to send a copy of any of the documents found. WAIS uses the Z39.50 query protocol to communicate between clients and servers. WAIS does not, at this time, implement the full Z39.50-1992 specification. In particular, WAIS does not permit boolean searches but instead is restricted to relevance feedback.