WAIS

Distributed information retrieval system that allows you to search huge amounts of information using keywords.

The abbreviation for Wide Area Information Service, WAIS is a Net-wide system for looking up specific information in Internet databases.

(Wide Area Information Servers) -- A commercial software package that allows the indexing of huge quantities of information, and then making those indices searchable across networks such as the Internet. A prominent feature of WAIS is that the search results are ranked (scored) according to how relevant the hits are, and that subsequent searches can find more stuff like that last batch and thus refine the search process.

See: Wide Area Information Servers

A distributed information service which offers simple natural language input, indexed searching for fast retrieval, and a "relevance feedback" mechanism which allows the results of initial searches to influence future searches. Public domain implementations are available. See also: archie, Gopher, Prospero.

WAIS (Wide Area Information Server ) An indexing system for documents that indexes the full text of the documents,and scores searches on the basis of the relevance of its vocabulary to the search terms.