WAIS
More info
- Creator
- Brewster Kahle, Thinking Machines
- Released
- 1989
- Type
- Distributed full-text search
Wide Area Information Servers — networked full-text search with ranked results, built before there was a web to search.
Brewster Kahle designed WAIS in 1989 at the supercomputer company Thinking Machines. Unlike Archie it searched the contents of documents rather than file names, and it built on the library protocol Z39.50. Results were ranked by relevance and you could ask the system for more documents like one you had liked — relevance feedback, long before today's search engines.
Servers registered voluntarily in a directory and the collections ranged from weather tables to manuals. The web took over, but the ideas did not die: Kahle sold WAIS Inc. to AOL in 1995 and founded the Internet Archive the following year, still run on the same notion that collections should be searchable rather than merely available.