Various Sources
Information browsing services differ from basic information retrieval
services because they permit a user to discover information
without retrieving a copy. Most information browsing services operate
interactively. Software on the user's computer
permits the user to contact a remote computer and examine the
information it contains.
Gopher, created at the university of Minnesota in 1991, is a specific
information browsing service available on the Internet.
A user interacts with the gopher client
software
on his or her local computer, which contacts gopher servers running
on remote computers as needed.
From the user's point of view, gopher consists of a large set of
menus
that span many computers. Each item in a gopher menu represents a
file of information, a computer program, or a pointer to another
menu. When the user selects an item, gopher either displays the
information, runs the computer program, or fetches and displays the
new menu. An item in a menu can reference information on a different
computer. Whenever a user selects such an item, the gopher software
contracts the new computer automatically. Because gopher keeps the
exact location of computers hidden from the user, it provides the
illusion of a single, large set of interconnected menus. The user
does not have to worry about domain names, IP addresses, changing
programs, etc.
To make it easy for a user to return to a menu item, gopher permits
the user to record the item's location in a bookmark. A user can
follow a bookmark directly to a particular item without searching the
menu system.
Submitted: Alexandros Zakas