It could be said that gopher's functionality falls somewhere between that of ftp and world wide web. It has a much more logical division of information than does ftp, but it lacks the powerful searching ability of the web search engines. It has much of the ease of file transfers that ftp does, but in order to find the files, one must first find a start location. Therein one finds the reoccuring theme of reliance on the web's searches.
Gopher was originally intended as a means to distribute and access academic papers and other files. It has stayed fairly true to this original form today. Upon launching the gopher program, one finds oneself at the root of the gopher hierarchy at his institution. From here, the user can either explore the 'gopherspace' in search of the required data, or choose a predetermined start location. The latter is probably the most expeditious method when researching a topic. In order to find a start altavista using a sampe query. An excerpt from the result follows:
Word count: gopher server: about 70000, reality:371456, virtual:1055079
Documents 1-10 of about 40000 matching some of the query terms, best matches first.
Computer Science. The UK Virtual Reality SIG gopher server. The UK Virtual Reality SIG http server. HCI93 VR
Exhibit gopher server. HCI93 VR Exhibit http server. NCSA Virtual Reality Lab. NCSA maintains a comprehensive list
of VR FTP sites. IEEE Call for...
http://cee.indiana.edu/surf/CS.html - size 1K - 22 May 95
Lokalni informacijski servisi (na Matematickom odjelu) WWW serveri: WWW stranica Matematickog odjela. Referalni
centar za programski sustav Mathematica. Studentski WWW server. Apache server - Virtual reality gallery. Gopher
server: Gopher server...
http://student.math.hr/infosys/mathinfsys.html - size 1K - 13 Oct 95
MAIN ATTRACTIONS. The Virtual Reality Project. Trinity University's WWW Server. Trinity University's Gopher
Server. Comments or Suggestions
http://elara.cs.trinity.edu/Main_Attractions/ - size 536 bytes - 18 Sep 95
The first of the three results proved to be the best, with references to two different gopher servers. As was expected, there was a sizeable collection of papers available for download. The main thing that became apparent in searching for information using gopher was that it was useful on its own, but became a very powerful tool when incorporated into a web browser.