Let's go back in time and visit a part of the Internet that's been somewhat neglected but is still very useful. In fact, the World Wide Web is only a few years old. Gopher was developed by the University of Minnesota and it was named, with University humor, to reflect two meanings, one with the spelling and one with the pronunciation.
Gopher sites contain only text, no graphics, no sound files, no nothing, just words.
If that sounds a bit dull, Gopher sites make up for it by the speed that they load. A researcher using one of today's modern computers can just zip through one site after another until he or she finds just the information needed. Therefore one can still use the Gopher sites to quickly find all sorts of data. You can identify a gopher site by it's address. Today most, but not all, sites are for scientific data.