WAIS stands for Wide Area Information Servers.
WAIS servers answer questions, based on keywords or natural language
queries. They can also look for documents that are similar to a given
document.
- WAIS servers use complex engines to answer queries.
They look at much more than exact or approximate word matches.
- WAIS servers may use similarities in how words "sound" as well as
how they are spelled.
This may lead to unexpected and undesirable results.
- The RBSE URL server
is a public search engine that uses a WAIS server.
Asking for documents about "Eindhoven" for instance, results in many
answers not containing that word, and not dealing with Eindhoven at all.
The RBSE URL server
is located at
http://rbse.jsc.nasa.gov/eichmann/urlsearch.html