A browsing and searching system that lets you look for and retrieve documents of interest from all over the Internet. Unlike FTP and Archie, it is a menu-based system that doesn't require you to know the details of host or file names. A Gopher server presents its contents as a hierarchically structured list of files.

Gopher was popular in the early 1990s, then it has been largely supplanted by Hypertext, also known as WWW (World Wide Web). With the ascendance of the Web, many gopher databases were converted to Web sites which can be more easily accessed via Web search engines.

Gopher was developed at the University of Minnesota and takes its name from the school's mascot (The "Golden Gophers"), as well as for the fact that it "goes for" information.