As someone too young to have used gopher://, I'd like to take your comment half-seriously: from a user POV, how is it different than, say, HTTP ? (I believe it occupies more or less the same domain)
It was pretty much a document search system. It was really useful at the time when I was at university as a number of universities and organisations had gopher servers with information not available on the then fledgling world wide web. It was in no way comparable with the web or http. My comment was more nostalgic than anything!