U.S. Federal Government ENG The purpose of the Advanced Search Facility is to provide an efficient means for gathering and indexing information on the Internet. The facility will support automatic indexing of the content of sites. The aggregated index will also include the contents of the GILS-compliant locators at each of the Federal agency sites. The facility includes a gatherer service, broker service, indexer, and a query processor. The gatherer extracts documents by following Web and FTP links and by using Z39.50 search and retrieve facilities. The broker collects gathered information from many gatherers. The indexer indexes documents and creates GILS locator records for any documents that do not have them. The Query Processor supports full-text, fielded Boolean, and proximity queries, including spatial queries. z3950s://sunibk1.er.usgs.gov:2200/WWW.GILS.NET Eliot Christian USA echristi@usgs.gov Home Page text/HTML http://asf.gils.net/ list0617 USGS ENG 19990731