From crispen@INTERNIC.NET Thu Sep 11 23:02:09 1997
Date: Thu, 11 Sep 1997 17:48:21 -0400
From: crispen@INTERNIC.NET
Reply-To: TOURBUS-Request@LISTSERV.AOL.COM
To: TOURBUS@LISTSERV.AOL.COM
Subject: TOURBUS -- 11 SEPTEMBER 1997 -- METAFIND
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\___/ \___/ T h e I n t e r n e t T o u r B u s \___/
TODAY'S TOURBUS TOPIC(S): METAFIND
TODAY'S TOURBUS STOP(S):
http://pw2.netcom.com/~sleight/rabbit1.html
http://www.metafind.com/
Howdy, y'all! :)
There are 2 signs of impending old age. The first is memory loss. The
other is ... umm ... umm ... There are 2 signs of impending old age ... :)
Seriously, though, I made a little "oopsie" in my last post. You may
remember that I wrote that
You might want to bypass [the British Monarchy] page altogether
and instead send your condolences [for Princess Diana] through
the British Foreign Consulate Office at
http://www.fco.gov.uk/feedback/
Well, at least the address is right. Unfortunately, I totally blew the
name of the site. For the record, the FCO is the British "Foreign and
Commonwealth Office," not the British "Foreign Consulate Office." [A
special thanks goes to John Burgess, the Information Officer/Press Attache'
at the US Embassy in London for catching that.]
Now for the new stuff. I want to welcome back one of TOURBUS' oldest
sponsors, and to thank them for helping keep our little bus of Internet
happiness on the road week after week . . .
*------------ FLYING NOODLE PASTA OF THE MONTH CLUB ---------------+
Only $19.95 plus shipping - 2 Gourmet PASTAS, 2 SAUCES
and recipes. A great gift or a small indulgence for yourself.
+---------------- -------------------+
Before we start today's tour, I have a little diversion that will probably
give you a chuckle. The following comes to us from Mary Smith, a friend of
mine here at the University of Alabama (Mary was the one that I sent all
those Moon Pies to when she was in Spain this summer).
If you are a big fan of magic tricks, especially card tricks, you really
need to check out
http://pw2.netcom.com/~sleight/rabbit1.html
My first reaction to this trick was identical to my reaction when the clock
on my VCR automatically set itself: "THIS IS THE WORK OF SATAN!"
I'll let you draw your own conclusions. [Seriously, though, this trick
isn't much of a trick after all. You'll probably figure it out in a minute
or two. If you can't figure it out, though, look for the "answer" in next
Thursday's TOURBUS.]
Now for the _real_ TOURBUS stop . . .
My love of the Dogpile search engine (http://www.dogpile.com) isn't much of
a secret anymore. We first visited Dogpile back on March 27th, and Dogpile
was even one of TOURBUS' Top Ten sites back in July. [By the way, you can
find both of these posts, as well as all of TOURBUS' previous posts, in the
TOURBUS archives at http://www.tourbus.com/]
Well, Aaron Flin, the guy who created Dogpile, has a SECOND search engine
called "Metafind." You can find Metafind on the World Wide Web at
http://www.metafind.com/
Metafind is, on the surface, a lot like the other meta search engines that
we have visited in the past. You type in your search term and Metafind
sends that search term to several different search engines at once.
According to Aaron, Metafind searches through six major search engines in
parallel, then returns the links and organizes the results. In particular,
Metafind retrieves
10 links from AltaVista twice [in other words, 20 links], 10 from
Excite twice [ditto], 50 from HotBot, 25 from InfoSeek, 10 from
OpenText, and 50 from Webcrawler.
Now for the neat part. While most meta search engines like Dogpile sort
and organize their results based on the search engine that generated the
results (you get 10 hits from Yahoo, 10 from AltaVista, 10 from Lycos,
etc.), Metafind lets you sort the results:
1. Alphabetically;
2. By domain; or
3. By keywords.
In other words -- and this will make no sense to you unless you have been
on the bus since May -- Metafind is a combination of Dogpile's sheer
searching power and Inference Find's capability to "cluster" the results
together into relevant groups.
Why is this important? Well, let's say that you are interested in seeing
if the Crispen family has their own homepage. Let's also say that all that
you know about my family, outside of the fact that they spawned me, is that
they *might* live in the state of Alabama.
Searching for the keyword "Crispen" in Dogpile might work, but I can
guarantee you that all of the irrelevant hits will make such a search
downright frustrating. With a keyword search for "Crispen" on Metafind,
sorted by domain, you can easily weed out the irrelevant links. How?
Well, a search for "Crispen" will generate hits from Web pages in counties
like Australia, Canada, Germany, and France (we're a popular family). If
we're looking for the Crispen family's homepage in Alabama, it is pretty
safe to assume that that homepage won't be located on a server in
Australia, Canada, Germany, or France. So we can ignore all of the hits in
those domains.
While "clustering" doesn't make the process of finding what you are looking
for fool-proof, it does make your searches a tad bit easier by giving you
the opportunity to ignore large clusters of hits not directly related to
what you are looking for.
[By the way, if you are _really_ interested in finding my family's
homepage, here is a hint: my family has a .NET address.] :)
There's not much more that I can say about Metafind, so I'll end it here.
As you can probably guess, Metafind is a _wonderful_ tool to use when all
other search engines fail you. By clustering its results alphabetically,
by domain, or by keywords, Metafind lets you easily throw out unrelated
clusters and find the search term that you are looking for.
TODAY'S TOURBUS TOPIC(S): METAFIND
TODAY'S TOURBUS STOP(S):
http://pw2.netcom.com/~sleight/rabbit1.html
http://www.metafind.com/
--------------------------------
TODAY'S SOUTHERN WORD OF THE DAY
--------------------------------
THANK (verb) - The ability to cognitively process.
Usage: "Ah thank ah'll have another Moon Pah."
(Special thanks to an anonymous TOURBUS rider for today's wurd)
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
[By the way ... that's "you-ay-won-eye-ex"]
=--------------------------------------------------------------------=
For info on my new book "Atlas for the Information Superhighway"
Visit http://ua1ix.ua.edu/~crispen/atlas.html
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.~~~. ))
(\__/) .' ) )) Patrick Douglas Crispen
/o o \/ .~ Network Solutions Inc. / The InterNIC
{o_, \ { Business E-mail: crispen@internic.net
/ , , ) \ Personal E-mail: crispen@brigadoon.com
`~ '-' \ } )) http://www.brigadoon.com/~crispen/
_( ( )_.'
'---..{____} Warning: squirrels.
