This rather long note is in response to questions about what to make of Internet Gopher, WAIS and other Internet information searching methods, and specifically how does this relate to Genbank keyword searching and entry fetching, as compared with the IRX service at genbank.bio.net, and perhaps to e-mail services. I see Gopher as potentially the best of the lot, though it doesn't exclude the usefulness of any of the others. But I don't want to debate merits now, rather to let you know there is now a Gopher server for Genbank that you can try and compare with the others.
Internet gopher is pretty easy to learn to use.
Gopher and WAIS provide somewhat different protocols for serving information out to clients over the Internet. WAIS is strong on linking together many dispersed servers to answer a given question. I think they both are good, but I think Gopher is an order of magnitude easier to learn, and install, and consequently will be more useful to more people. They both provide simple client and server programs, including a way to index text files and to query that index for key word searches. Gopher in fact relies on the WAIS indexing and searching routines.