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Thinking Machines Corp provided a service called the Directory of Servers.

It was a WAIS server like any other information source but contained information about the other WAIS servers on the Internet.

When one would create a WAIS server with the TMC WAIS code it would create a special kind of record containing metadata and some common words to describe the content of the index.

It would be uploaded to the central server and indexed along with the records from other public servers.

One could search the directory to find servers that might have content relevant to a specific field of interest.

This model of searching for ( WAIS ) servers to search became the role model for GILS and Peter Deutsch's WHOIS ++ distributed white pages directory.