Searching the Web
A few months ago (
The Green Sheet
Issue 95:11:02) we told you about the benefits of Web "search engines" for finding useful pages on the World Wide Web (the multimedia, graphical portion of the Internet). If you'll recall, the main point of the article was that while the "crawler" type search engines are far more comprehensive in their searches, the "submittal" type provided more tailored queries that saved you time. The "crawlers" take far longer to get to the pertinent data because they have so many pages to search through. But a solution may have just risen to help us. Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) has announced (and debuted) Alta Vista, a new Web search engine, which DEC claims is up to 100 times faster than other search engines. According to DEC, Alta Vista indexes nearly sixty million Web pages (compared to Lycos' seven million and World Wide Web Worm's three million). This means that the attraction of the "crawler" type searchers (high number of possible links) now gets coupled with the specificness of a tailored search (fewer "garbage" hits). You'll find Alta Vista at
http://www.altavista.digital.com. Note for the net savvy: on the road and don't have a news reader handy? Alta Vista features posting of selected UseNet newsgroup messages, without needing a newsreader to view!
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