From:   Patrick Douglas Crispen [SMTP:crispen@CAMPUS.MCI.NET]
Sent:   Thursday, May 29, 1997 8:17 PM
To:     TOURBUS@LISTSERV.AOL.COM
Subject:        TOURBUS -- 29 MAY 1997 -- INFERENCE FIND

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TODAY'S STOPS:     INFERENCE FIND
TODAY'S ADDRESSES: http://www.tourbus.com/tbfaq.html
                   http://www.inference.com/ifind/

If you have been a passenger on our little bus of Internet happiness for a
while and know my world-famous "squirrel story" (which can be found in the
TOURBUS FAQ file at ), I have a story
that will give you a chuckle.  Mark Henderson sent me the following e-mail
message a few weeks ago:

     Hi.  I run squirrel.com.  It is a small private site on the
     Internet.

     I've been wondering for months why people keep telnetting to my
     machine and trying to login as Patrick.  I have a grand total of
     two users, myself and my wife.  No "Patrick" here.  People from
     all over the world try to login to squirrel.com as Patrick on a
     more or less daily basis.

     Finally, I did an AltaVista search on the web on Patrick NEAR
     squirrel.com.  Lo and behold, I finally understand.

I guess, like it or not, I am going to be forever linked with Alabama's
squirrels!  :)

Seriously, though, I have a question that I'd like to ask y'all.  As you
have probably gathered by now, Bob and I tend to use a lot of ASCII
graphics (like our bus) in each of our TOURBUS posts.  Well, we have a few
TOURBUS riders who are visually impaired and who "read" TOURBUS with the
help of text-to-speech translators.  While our ASCII graphics may *look*
cool (well, *I* like them), each of the graphics *sound* something like
"slash tilde tilde tilde tilde tilde tilde tilde tilde ..."  Granted,
that's NOWHERE as annoying as "m-bop," but it is still quite annoying.  :)

Anyway, my question is:

     Is there a command or "flag" that can be put in the body of an e-
     mail message that would tell text-to-speech readers (like
     Kurzweil readers) to ignore the next X number of lines in that
     message?

If you know the answer, let me know.

*-------------------------------------------------------------*
    Q: As a business owner, how can I take orders on
       the Net and be able to put the money in my
       bank account the same day ?
    A: mailto:chekfaxx@mailback.com for details in 2 mins.
*-------------------------------------------------------------*

[Oh, by the way ... I am *STILL* working on that virus software post.  As I
said last week, I should have something to send you in a week or two.]

INFERENCE FIND
--------------

Okay.  I'll admit it.  We've talked about search engines a lot recently.
We've visited "single" search engines like AltaVista (TOURBUS, 24 April
1997) and InfoSeek (TOURBUS, 10 October 1996), and "meta" search engines
like MetaCrawler (11 April 1996) and Dogpile (27 March 1997).

However, thanks to the help of several friendly TOURBUS riders, I've found
a *new* search engine that gives even Dogpile a run for its money.  The new
search engine is called "Inference Find" and you can find it on the Web at

     http://www.inference.com/ifind/

Like MetaCrawler and Dogpile, Inference Find is a meta search engine.  That
means that Inference Find sends your queries to a whole bunch of different
search engines, increasing the likelihood that you will actually find what
you are looking for.

What makes Inference Find unique is that it sends it searches out in
parallel.  Most meta search engines work something like this:

     1. They send your search query to one search engine.

     2. The meta search engine then sits around waiting for that
        particular search engine to reply.

     3. Once that first search engine replies, the meta search engine
        receives the results and then sends your query to another
        search engine.

     4. The meta search engine then sits around waiting for that
        second search engine to reply.

     5. Etc., etc., etc.

In other words, with most meta searches, there is an awful lot of waiting
going on.  That's why some meta searches can take up to several minutes to
complete.

Inference Find bypasses this problem by sending your search query to a
whole bunch of different search engines simultaneously (a.k.a. "in
parallel").  Inference Find's "pool" of search engines is not quite as
large as the other meta search engines -- currently, Inference Find only
queries AltaVista, Excite, InfoSeek, Lycos, WebCrawler, and Yahoo -- but
I've discovered that the quality of Inference Find's "hits" is still quite
high.  And, thanks to the fact that the queries are sent out in ks to Sharon-Bob for today's word)

YOU CAN FIND ALL OF THE OLD SOUTHERN WORDS OF THE DAY ON THE SOUTHERN WORD
HOMEPAGE AT http://ua1ix.ua.edu/~crispen/word.html

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            .~~~.  ))
  (\__/)  .'     )  ))      Patrick Douglas Crispen
  /o o  \/     .~          The University of Alabama
 {o_,    \    {              crispen@campus.mci.net
   / ,  , )    \         http://ua1ix.ua.edu/~crispen/
   `~  '-' \    } ))
  _(    (   )_.'              Warning: squirrels.
 '---..{____}


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