The contents of these directories are said to be available by anonymous ftp. Anonymous ftp directories may be accessed through Mosaic. If you know where the item you're looking for is, you can obtain a document with a link to it by filling out the form in this document, and hitting the button. It is a nontrivial problem for a World Wide Web browser like NCSA Mosaic to properly handle the wide range of datatypes residing on various FTP sites. When a gopher client begins, it receives a primary menu from its home server.
Client applications request documents using keywords.
WAIS does not yet permit boolean searches but instead is restricted to relevance feedback. The client may then request the server to send a copy of any of the documents found. A URL is a Uniform Resource Locator . The second is normally the address of the machine where the data or service is situated. Additional portions may define the names of files, the port to link to, or the document to search for in a database.