From: Bob Rankin (bobrankin@ULSTER.NET)
Reply-To: TOURBUS-Request@LISTSERV.AOL.COM
To: TOURBUS@LISTSERV.AOL.COM
Subject: TOURBUS - 22 Sep 1998 - Revving Up the Search Engines
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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: Revving Up The Search Engines
Greetings fellow riders! In today's issue you'll learn about some
promising new Web search engines, and how to stay up to date with the
latest in search engine technology.
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WHO LEFT THE REFRIGERATOR DOOR OPEN?
------------------------------------
Before we begin our tour for the day, I wanted to remind you about the
Cryonics survey we mentioned in a previous issue. It's really quite
fascinating, and you'll be surprised at some of the answers. Is Walt
Disney's body frozen? Find out soon, because the survey is closing in
a few days.
Cryonics Survey - http://homepages.waymark.net/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/wbadger/demoinfo.cgi
THE SCIENCE OF SEARCHING
------------------------
The amount of information on the Web is growing fast, but the human
brain is not getting much better at sifting through piles of data.
The inevitable result is that it's getting harder to find what you're
after. To solve this problem, we need better tools and/or techniques
for searching in cyberspace.
If you're well versed in using the advanced features of search engines
like AltaVista or Infoseek, you can usually narrow down your search
and find something useful after a few queries. But wouldn't it be
nice if search engines gave you something useful on the first try,
instead of 70,000 irrelevant hits? What if a search engine could weed
out the stuff you're not interested in, and just show you the pages
that are most likely to be relevant?
Your wish may soon be granted, thanks to some work done by scientists
at IBM's Almaden Research Center. The goal of the CLEVER project is
to help searchers find a small set of documents that represent the
most authoritative or relevant information on the requested subject.
For example, if you do a search on "baseball", you probably would
rather find the Major League Baseball Home Page instead of Dirk's
Baseball Collectibles.
CLEVER knows how to do that. By scoring the results based on how many
other pages link to the initial hits, the importance of those links,
and some other weighting factors, CLEVER can zero in on the good
stuff. This is fundamentally different than the Direct Hit
technology, (see our August 25 issue in the Tourbus Archives) hich
relies on previously gathered human feedback to rank search results.
By contrast, CLEVER relies only on the data to rank the results.
Unfortunately, you can't try CLEVER for yourself just now. IBM may
soon license the technology to major search engine sites, or it may be
used to build a Yahoo-like index to the Web with automatically
generated lists of sites corresponding to popular searches. You can
read more about CLEVER here:
CLEVER - http://www.almaden.ibm.com/cs/k53/clever.html
...or you can try an experimental search engine called Google, which
uses similar weighted-link ranking techniques, here:
Google - http://google.stanford.edu
Google seems to work pretty well, but it is a research project, and
its index covers only about 1/4 of the Web right now. Still, it was
the ONLY search engine that gave me www.tourbus.com as the #1 hit for
a search on "tourbus".
SEARCH ENGINE WATCH
-------------------
If you have an insatiable need for the latest news about search
engines, how they work, how they compare, and how to get the most out
of them, you must visit the Search Engine Watch site regularly.
Search Engine Watch - http://searchenginewatch.com
You find the Webmaster's Guide To Search Engines, with tips on
prepping your website for the search engines, Search Engine Facts and
Fun, with tips on using the major search engines, and the free Search
Engine Report Newsletter. There's even a section on Search Engine
EKGs, which details the "health" of the major players, both
technically and financially. If you're a webmaster or a heavy duty
web researcher, it's a must-see site.
FIND YOURSELF ON THE PLUS BUS
-----------------------------
Lots of people are telling us how much they enjoy both TOURBUS and the
special weekend TOURBUS PLUS edition! In recent postings, PLUS readers
learned about the Cult of the Dead Cow, the Internet Detective, and
where online news junkies get their daily fix. To learn more about
TOURBUS PLUS, and the $1000 MULTIMEDIA COMPUTER giveaway,
CLICK HERE - http://www.tourbus.com/plus.htm
See you next time! --Bob Rankin
=====================[ TOURBUS Rider Information ]===================
The Internet Tourbus - U.S. Library of Congress ISSN #1094-2238
Copyright 1995-98, Rankin & Crispen - All rights reserved
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