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Search Engines Part 1
by By Terry Currier — NOCCC, tcurrier@aol.com - July 25, 2000 at 00:51:20:
In the beginning, the Internet was such a jumble that only experienced people could find anything. You had to know it was there and how to get to it before even trying. Now there are many different search engines out there to help guide you. I saw a number of them at the Spring Internet World, and all of them claimed to be different and the best. Some of them claimed the title because you can ask for information in natural language. Believe me, the answers you sometimes get back makes you wonder if it understood what you asked. The article here really is based upon my opinions, or in other words, what I liked or disliked about a search engine.I really don’t care if one indexes more sites then others. Magazines have estimated that only 24% of the Internet is actually indexed at this current time. It’s the value of the information given that I looked for.
If the website is cluttered with ads so you have to look to find where to put your request it’s a distraction and is less efficient. In the same way the search box on some are so small you may not even see all the information you put there. I look to see if the site has tips on how to do a search, and does it eliminate duplicates.
If it comes back with 100,000 listings with requested information and then I find out most of it does not pertain to what I wanted, I’m not happy. Besides, after going through 300 listings I’m numb and forget what I requested. I especially liked it if it allowed a search upon a search to further narrow the list down. I also checked to see if it could forgive slight misspellings, which some could, while others could not.
This is the list of terms I searched for:
• WINNERS user group
• Leukemia treatment STI 571 – latest drug
• Costa Mesa code enforcement
• Orange Coast College
• St Andrews Presbyterian Church – turns out this was the hardest one to find
• America Online – some do not want to list anything from AOL
• Sequoi(a) National Park – left the a off to see how it could handle a misspell
Things I looked for:
• Setup - window has enough room or cluttered site
• Search within a search
• Tips for search
• Eliminate duplicates
Dogpile.com — http://www.dogpile.com
Dogpile is a metasearch engine it will look at ten different search engines, as well as its own. When I asked it to search for Leukemia treatment STI571 it under-stood and even suggested to also look at a health website. If you search just within its own web catalog, they list a percentage of relevance, but not for the metasearch.
Dogpile may eliminate duplicate headings within a search engine but it does not filter them out of others. Therefore, your 1000 finds could cover some of the same ground. I found the same heading and websites presented by them to be on several different lists.
In a separate box, they will break down a request, asking if you are (for example) looking for Leukemia or treatment and listing other places to go. Its web robot does not do websites within America Online. In fact looking for America Online it did not even list the aol.com website at all. I found it very easy to work with and it could be customized to look in the order (of search engines) you want it to, you must accept a cookie for this though.
You can even tell it to look for information limited to a specific geographic area. Also listed on Dogpile.com is weather, jobs, maps, Audio/MP3, white and yellow phone listings. Auctions search allows you to search over 30 major auction Websites simultaneously from the Dogpile search box. You have access to auctions at eBay, Yahoo!, Amazon.com, MSN, Auctions.com, and more in one search. The results give you a product description, the current bid, the number of bids an item has received and the time remaining until the auction closes.
Dogpile will let you add their search form to any web page you like. Their description of details tells how they survey primary COM, ORG, EDU, NET and GOV Web servers and distill their contents to produce the database. It’s an index of sites, not pages. It is very good at finding companies and organizations by purpose, product, subject matter or location. However, it is not designed to find esoteric information on individual Web pages.
Their Web robot is dispatched to each site to obtain the Web pages. Additions and updates are performed at the rate of about 100 sites per minute. The growth rate is about 25,000 newly discovered sites per week. By the way, for most of the searches I did, it gave about the same number of finds as if you went directly to each search engine. Here is what a search for Costa Mesa code enforcement looked like at Dogpile. You can also see how it breaks it up into how each search engine wants the information given.
Are you looking for—
Costa Mesa, Code Enforcement, Costa Code, Armalite Costa Mesa , Hotels Costa Mesa, Costa Mesa, Ca, Costa Mesa Homes
Search engine—
• Looksmart found 0 documents. The query string sent was Costa Mesa code enforcement
• GoTo.com found 10 or more documents. The query string sent was +Costa +Mesa +code +enforcement
• Dogpile Open Directory found 0 documents. The query string sent was Costa Mesa code enforcement
• FindWhat.com found 0 results. The query string sent was Costa Mesa code enforcement
• Google found about 544 documents. The query string sent was Costa Mesa code enforcement
• Direct Hit found 0 documents. The query string sent was Costa Mesa code enforcement
• Infoseek found 1 documents. The query string sent was +Costa +Mesa +code +enforcement
• Lycos found 10 or more documents. The query string sent was Costa Mesa code enforcement
• RealNames found 10 documents. The query string sent was Costa Mesa code enforcement
• AltaVista found 92,776 documents. The query string sent was Costa Mesa code enforcement
• Yahoo found 0 documents. The query string sent was +Costa +Mesa +code +enforcement
Yahoo.com —http://www.yahoo.com—Yahoo started it all. The founders, while in college, started listing the websites that they went to and then passed their list around. They found that there was a great interest in the list and so Yahoo was founded. Unlike all the other search engines, this one is maintained by humans. To become listed, a webmaster must request it. Yahoo checks it out and lists it according to the information they gather. For just that reason it is much more limited in the number of listings that they have. At the same time it is more accurate then a computer that goes out, gathers the information and then classifies it.
The site is well organized and you can search by the categories (mostly company websites). You can also get stock quotes, news, weather, travel information, or even shop through Yahoo. Beyond that, they have personal chat rooms, classified ads, instant messaging, and yellow pages. Clicking on the advanced search will give you several options, looking for exact matches of a phrase or by each word. You may also limit the search to a period of time, 1 day, 3 days, 1 week, 1 month, 3 month, 6 months, 1 year, or 4 years. Tips on the four types of query syntax are available.
Snap.com — http://www.snap.com—It has a good interface; they have different categories if you want to look up such things as health or finance. Like Yahoo, you can get free e-mail, horoscopes, personals, stock quotes, weather, and software downloads. It does not give the actual number of finds for a search, rather it tells the number of pages at about 15 web sites to a page. It was able to find everything except the WINNERS web site. It does a “so-so” job of eliminating duplicates. Searching for Winners it listed the same site address from Computer Currents six times. There are direct links to AltaVista, Excite, Search.com, Yahoo, Direct Hit, and GoTo search engines.
Open Directory — http://dmoz.org—Is not a powerful search engine, but it is not all bad either. It could not find the WINNERS website or St Andrews Presbyterian Church. The leukemia search found information, but not about the latest treatment using STI-571. Also nothing for sequoi, it did not know what to do with it. It does have direct links to: All the Web, AltaVista, Deja, Google, HotBot, Infoseek, Netscape, Northern Light, and Yahoo search engines.
iWon — http://www.iwon.com—iWon is the web site with a contest to get you to come to them by giving away money. On a personal preference, I think their search window should be wider. Their search abilities are pretty good, but like AltaVista it gives you something for every word you give it. For example, Winners user group had 14,274,481; the Costa Mesa request had 6,048,225. These numbers are greater than all the others combined. I went into advanced search and put in more information, which greatly reduced the numbers. There were many duplicate sites, also numerous sites with the same heading or summary. Some slightly different web address or completely different sites, but obviously the same information. There are search tips for the user. Direct links to: AltaVista, Excite, Hotbot, Infoseek, Lycos, and Yahoo. You can also get various news, weather, sports, and stock market. It could not find the WINNERS site, from the looks of it they do not list anything from members.aol.com. A search was actually done f or members.aol.com. and it came back with only one response.
MSN Search —http://search.msn.com—It has good setup with a number of good options. Advanced search options include find any of the words, all of the words, words in title, exact phrase, Boolean phrase or link to URL. It cannot do a search within a search. It found all the information that I looked for. The information can be sorted can by title, date or relevance. You can force it to look only within a certain region, domain, and time period. MSN allows you to save the search results for you to review later. Or, when searching for different terms under the same subject, use Saved Results to store results from different searches. So a search for leukemia treatment can lead to a search on cancer. Save each and review them later. While duplicates may be screened, I found the same summary information word for word duplicated at more then one site. So, it may check for site address, but not for summary content.
Google — http://www.google.com—Google has a lot going for it, a clean front page that is easy to use. Its index of infor-mation was very good at finding everything I give it except the St Andrews Presbyterian Church. Great features to make it easy to find exactly what you want. Google will allow a search within a search. So I could narrow down the Andrews search of 37,500 hits to 8,700 by adding California, then adding Newport Beach it went down to 914.
If you click on the show matches (Cache) it shows you what it found when it went to the site. The keywords you told it to look for are highlighted so you can see if that web site is what you need. You can then click directly to it or look for similar sites. When you click on the “Similar Pages” link for a particular result, GoogleScout technology automatically scouts the web for pages that are related to this result. For example, if the starting page is the home page of a university, it will return the home pages of other universities. But if the starting page is the university’s computer science department, it will find related computer science departments, not related universities.
The “I’m Feeling Lucky™” button automatically takes you directly to the first web page Google returned for your query. You will not see the other search results at all. An “I’m Feeling Lucky” search means less time searching for web pages and more time looking at them. When Google finds multiple results from the same web site, the most relevant result is listed first with the other relevant pages from that same site indented below it. You may also try your query through direct links to: AltaVista, Deja, eGroups, Excite, HotBot, Infoseek, Lycos, Open Directory, and Yahoo.
Oingo — http://www.oingo.com—Oingo is artificial language based, not a natural language search. When you get to the site, it proclaims, “we know what you mean.” They do a pretty good job at it, but I feel it still has a ways to go. When you are searching for something it presents its Oingo categories on the left and the web sites on the right. It will also ask you to further define what it is that you are looking for.
For the leukemia search, it presented four lines for me to define further. For each one it wanted to know if I wanted to search all possible meanings, the term itself, never mind the meaning just look for the word, or remove the term from the search. For the word “treatment”, it presented eight different categories such as care, communications, and artistic style. While this was okay at first, it gets irritating after a number of searches. I would compare it to the Microsoft Office Assistant. While it is okay and helpful, after a while you will be saying, just give me the results.
Also, the web sites they list for you while linked they don’t show the address if you wanted to print it out for later reference. I found the St Andrews church link but it did not work, it did not have the “www” in front. Later when I checked it again, it did put it in, go figure. To get the best results use phrases instead of entire sentences. It did find everything I gave it to look for. The information they use is from AltaVista.
Dogpile Yahoo Snap Open Dir iWon MSN Google Oingo
Setup Cluttered 8.5 8.5 7 7 8 7.5 9.5 7
Search within Search 0 0 0 0 5 0 9.5 6
Relevant Information 9 8 7 7 7 8.5 8.5 7
Found Information 9 7 7 7 9 9 9 7
Tips for Search 9 8 8 8 8 8 9.5 6
Eliminate Duplicates 7.5 6 6 6 6 6 8 7
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