It makes my researcher blood boil just thinking about it. Say I find an article on Cyrix 486 chips that exactly hits the spot. I can then pull terms from that document and use them to start a new search. WAIS gives me the ability, once I'm on the right trail, to spring down the path to other relevant articles. For this ability alone, WAIS, even in its current teething stage, is an excellent information-gathering tool.
WEB brings hypertext to the Internet.
It's a way to look at documents that, while not unique to computers, makes full use of a computer's ability to interconnect data. In a hypertext document, certain words are links to other documents or files. WEB takes the hypertext idea and applies it to information available on the Internet. The result is potentially the most powerful automated information-gathering tool in existence. Alas, for now, WEB remains mostly potential.