"Yahoo and Lycos will help you find Web pages related to virtually anything." - Adam Gaffin, April 1995 (2)
At the beginning of 1995, Yahoo and Lycos were the undisputed leaders in the WWW search engine sweepstakes. Now, three years later, these old favourites have been joined by several newer, faster and larger competitors.
The Best...
Some combine many of these into one handy search spot, which our top three sites all do.
- ProFusion, by Susan Gauch and Guijun Wang at the Design Lab at the University of Kansas, integrates nine user selectable search engines (11) and, like Metacrawler, returns a single ranked search result. Users may selection Simple, Boolean or Phrase searching as well as various combinations of engines to search the Web or Usenet. Its ability to discriminate and be selective in what it returns appears to be consistently superior to any other multisite search engine. This functionality has been carefully designed into ProFusion.
- MetaCrawler, developed by Erik Selberg and Oren Etzioni at the University of Washington, combines most major search engines (8) into a single search form which then returns results in a combined result, ranked by success in finding the search term. Its unique feature is that it will verify that each reference returned is a valid address. MetaCrawler is now a commercial venture, operated by go2net, which took over exclusive operation from Netbot Inc. in February, 1997. (More background is available. There is also a review from C-Net.)
- Savvy Search by Daniel Dreilinger at Colorado State does much the same thing as MetaCrawler, only you have to check the "Integrate Results" box at the bottom of the form to return a sorted single result. Otherwise, Savvy search arranges results by search engine (9). Savvy Search now supports over 20 languages besides English. Colorado State seems a hotbed for search engine development, having also given the Web the World Wide Web Worm and the Harvest Search Software. (There is a review from C-Net.)
Interesting Reading...
A British Columbia teacher has prepared an excellent course outline about using search engines. A researcher in Britain has done an interesting comparison of several search tools.
And there are recent reviews of and a guide to using search engines from C-Net.
The Rest of the Best...
Alta Vista from Digital Equipment Corporation demonstrates the power of DEC's Alpha chip servers, providing very fast access to all 10 billion words found in over 21 million Web pages. Alta Vista has developed the most sophisticated search tools of any of the major sites. Like most other large search engines, it compiles its data by automatically searching other web sites. Alta Vista also has a full-text index of thousands of news groups updated in real-time. Any articles retrieved come from DEC's own news server, so you are not limited by your own ISP's news server.
excite provides full text search of millions of pages. It is a service of Architext, founded in September of 1993 by six Stanford University graduates who were tired of making keyword searches. Also, some you may search more than 1 million articles from 10,000 newsgroups - though the article will have to be on you local news server in order for you to retrieve it. Clicking on a poster's email address will activate the send mail function in many browsers.
HotBot , which went online in May, 1986, is a collaboration between Inktomi and Wired Magazine. A database of over 50 million documents is search by a series of special algorithms by parallel processing on linked work stations. Its developers claim HotBot's crawler can scan over 7 million documents a day, searching the Internet for new information. This allows HotBot to refresh its entire database every week. HotBot searches the complete text of every document in its enormous database (not just a few words from each), and maintains the original word order. HTML, Usenet, mailing lists, plug-ins, Java, and other popular media types are identified, classified, and specially indexed.
Open Text Index is a service of UUNET Canada, based in Toronto. The Index provides simple and advanced search forms to access a constantly updated set of web pages. In February 1996, the Open Text Index contained about 2.5 billion words of text, and almost 28 million hyperlinks.
Yahoo! was the first really popular WWW search tool. It combines a search engine with a subject tree hierarchy. It's main advantage is not volume or speed, but the fact that each entry has been checked and selected by Yahoo's staff. If you find it on Yahoo, it will probably be useful. The two developers of Yahoo!, David Filo and Jerry Yang, Ph.D. candidates in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, started their guide in April 1994 , before making it a full time business in 1995. "Yahoo!" probably seemed to them to be more contemporary than "Eureka!" - though David and Jerry claim it stands for "Yet Another Hierarchically-Oriented Oracle"
Lycos Lycos' catalog currently covers over 10 million URL's. It doesn't provide a full text search of each page, but rather indexes key information from the top of each page. Updated weekly, Lycos searches not just "http" sites, but also includes FTP and gopher addresses. Unlike other Web catalogs or directories, Lycos indexes non-text Internet resources including graphics, sounds, full-motion video and executable programs. Dr. Michael L. Mauldin, developer of the Lycos spider technology at Carnegie Mellon University is now chief scientist at Lycos, a commercial enterprise now allied with Microsoft. Lycos is named after a voracious spider in mythology, which could not only spread a wide web but had the ability to "wolf" [lykos=Greek for wolf] down things - like information. Web spiders are robots (or web bots) which automatically searches the web for information.
Magellan, from the McKinley Group, is an Internet directory powered by the Verity search engine containing listings for approximately 1.5 million sites. Of these, over 40,000 are fully reviewed and rated (with one to four stars). The McKinley Group's editorial process includes an in-house team of subject matter specialists working in coordination with the McKinley Editorial Advisory Board, a panel of international experts The McKinley Group was founded in 1993 by a team of international publishers, technologists, and information specialists committed to delivering the best navigational and informational directory for the Internet. .
Web Crawler The WebCrawler Project began as Brian Pinkerton's research project at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington in Seattle. In June, 1995 the project moved to America Online, where it continues to operate as a freely available Internet search tool. It is now powered by the excite search engine.
Deja News allows forms searches of thousands of newsgroups with a variety of filters. DejaNews gives you access to most of the Usenet postings in the last month, except articles posted to groups that match alt.*, soc.*, talk.* or *.binaries. Selected groups have an extended history of up to a year. Also, if you click on a poster's email address link, you will get a summary of postings made by that person.
Northern Light is a Cambridge, Massachusetts company which began in September, 1995. Its Internet search engine enables you to search the World Wide Web and information from over 3,400 premium sources. Web results are combined with information from premium material in one search, giving you access to books, magazines, databases, and newswires not available from any other search engine. Results are returned prioritized by best match and organized into folders that help narrow your searches. The Custom Search Folders are not pre-set, but are created specifically according to your search request.
InfoSeek's free to anyone database contained more than two million articles compiled from over 10,000 Internet newsgroups and 200,000 World Wide Web pages when the service began.
Galaxy began in January , 1994, as a subject index and searchable gopher index. It has since expanded to contain many WWW web links. The Galaxy uses WAIS technology for searching various indexes. It supports boolean phrases in all index searches, including Gopherspace searches. It is operated by Trade Wave, an Austin, Texas company specializing in Internet business applications.
Search Com from C-Net is a front-end menu to some 250 general and specialized search engines. It also contains a good guide to using search engines and can be customized for personal use.
William Cross's All-in-One combines over one hundred engines searchable by form into a hierarchy based on the main types of sources or information sought. (There is a review from C-Net.)
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