Items on this menu may be drawn from many gopher servers. Unlike Archie, the search results can connect you directly to the data source. The user tells the client, in plain English, what to look for out in dataspace. The client then searches various WAIS servers around the globe. The user tells the client how relevant each hit is, and the client can be sent out on the same quest again and again to find new documents.
Client software is available for many different types of computers.
The WWW world consists of documents and links . Indexes are special documents which, rather than being read, may be searched. The Web contains documents in many formats. All documents, whether real, virtual or indexes, look similar to the reader and are contained within the same addressing scheme. These are the only operations necessary to access the entire world of data.