WAIS

WAIS, or Wide Area Information Server, is a distributed information retrieval system and the protocol used to query it. It allowed searching across document collections distributed over a network. First released in the late 1980s, WAIS provided a framework to index, search, and retrieve text documents remotely.

The architecture centers on servers that hold indexes and data, and clients that form queries and present results. The WAIS protocol defines the dialogue between client and server, including the syntax of queries and the format of returned records. WAIS supported boolean and fielded search, and returned results with titles, summaries, and links to the source.

History and impact: WAIS was one of the early systems that demonstrated distributed search across networks and helped advance online information retrieval prior to the Web's rise. As web search engines emerged in the mid-1990s, WAIS declined in prominence; many servers were retired, though some legacy implementations remained for a time. The project influenced later information retrieval ideas and contributed to the development of distributed search concepts and related protocols.

Legacy: Today WAIS is largely of historical interest, cited as an early step in the evolution of internet search and distributed indexing.