Gopher is a communications protocol designed for distributing, searching, and retrieving documents over LAN or over the internet. It is designed to be a menu-driven alternative to the early web but has been less popular that using the web browser to view HTTP content. Every gopher page is designed to be like a directory on a hard drive or the results page of a search engine, it has a bunch of links and explanations as what each link is so you can get closer to finding the page that has the information that you want.