Albeit dominated by college and university professors and students, the Internet is no longer confined to the ivory tower. Currently, the Internet provides access to approximately 40 million users in over 90 countries. Unlike using a traditional library, locating and retrieving information on the Internet can be rather challenging. However, there are several useful software tools that allow the Internet user to structure information and to search for material. Two of the most popular are Gopher and the World Wide Web.
Gopher is a menu-driven system that provides access to the information resources of the Internet.
These resources may be databases, data files, text files or even other Gophers. As the name implies, once given the search parameters of the user, Gopher searches the Internet for relevant matches to the inputted query. That material is retrieved and displayed on the computer screen for the user's evaluation. The obvious advantage of this software is that the user need not comb the intricate pathways of the Internet blindly. The Web is based on an organizational system known as hypertext.