Gopher offers many search mechanisms. Veronica is a tool to search menu titles of all the Gopher servers. You can also search all of Gopher space. Many other searchable items are available as well. In TurboGopher they are marked with a question mark.
Information is made available in databases, called sources.
For example, World Factbook by the CIA is one available source. WAIS creates a full text index of the information in a source. When a user queries the source, WAIS searches the index for the most relevant documents and presents the user with a list of the findings. WAIS for Mac is a popular client application for Macintosh users. It's available on CNS Distribution.