If you don't see your question here, please send technical support feedback or questions using our on-line form and get your question answered directly. A. WAIS stands for Wide Area Information Servers. WAIS is an Internet utility that lets you do keyword searches of over 500 indices on the Internet.
Indices exist on a variety of topics.
At this point there are more for technical subjects such as computer science or particle physics, but other subjects are being added all the time. The Project Gutenberg collection is searchable, and there a few indices of the Bible and other religious texts available. When you do a WAIS search you search specific indices by keyword. The results are weighted according to how closely they fit the search topic, and you see a list of items that fit your search most closely. Once you have a list of items, you can save items to your hard drive or open and read them immediately.