Welcome to WAIS!

(This page is essentially defunct. WAIS shows all the symptoms of being a dying protocol, with the various catalogues, proxies etc. all either dead, broken or stated to be out of date. So now you know!)

Welcome to WAIS---the Wide Area Information Service. WAIS consists of a variety of servers, scattered all over the world, each offering search facilities on some particular topic or topics.

By hypertext standards, WAIS can seem a little slow and clumsy. A WAIS server does not supply an initial "home page": you must supply a search string, and the WAIS server then supplies whatever references it deems relevant to that search string.

Nevertheless, there is a lot of information out there on WAIS, and perseverance can bring a rich data harvest!

Note: you may have to get your browser to ask a "WAIS proxy" machine to actually fetch the WAIS data on its behalf. The Demon Internet proxy cache service is a sensible choice of WAIS proxy for UK users. Follow the instructions for your browser (though you may wish to only perform the WAIS-related changes given there, and ignore the rest).

Some catalogues of WAIS servers

Unfortunately all these catalogues simply list the names of the WAIS servers they cover, without descriptions. However, at least the Canadian catalogue has a brief description of each server inside that server's hypertext link.

The WWW Organisation's catalogue.
A Canadian catalogue.
directory-of-servers.src: a WAIS server that keeps track of the world's WAIS servers! (Server entries often misinterpreted as binary data by Netscape.)

This corner of the web maintained by Iain Stewart <ids@doc.ic.ac.uk>, Department of Computing, Imperial College, London, UK

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