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Also see the new Search Engine Comparison Chart!
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On the new home page, you will find a link to AltaVista's new toolbar option (becoming de rigueur these days for search engines). You can add it to your browser toolbars in the same way you can add a Google toolbar, a Teoma toolbar, a HotBot toolbar, etc.
AltaVista's conversion calculator is virtually identical to the one provided by AllTheWeb, except that you do not have to use the colon after the word "convert" and you can also use the word "conversion". As with AllTheWeb, you can do conversions for length, time, speed, temperature, weight, area, and cooking/volume. For example:
convert 3 mi
convert 3 miles
conversion 15 hrs
conversion 15 hours
AltaVista in not advertising it yet, but you can also do math calculations , similar to Google and AllTheWeb. For example:
((5+3)*4^2)/2If you haven't taken a look recently at the various "Shortcuts" provided by AltaVista, do so at
Home › AltaVista Help > Search > Shortcuts You are more likely to have noticed these popping up when you do certain kinds of searches (which is what AltaVista intended.) These include area codes, directions, downloads, exchange rates, recipes, etc.
AltaVista's Local Sponsored Listings -There is a lot of talk about "localized" searches these days, since Google's announcement of its Beta "Search by Location ". With AltaVista, you now have a local search, fully there (not just Beta), but just being applied to "sponsored listings." (from Overture). Do a search on some product and you will see local (to your ZIP code) merchants:
AltaVista has probably been able to figure out your ZIP code, which you will see in the box, and you will find listings for local merchants who provide that product, the distance from your ZIP code to them, and a link to get a map. You will also see a link to more local listings and you can change the ZIP code, or use an area code.(October 2003)
For example: title:putin AND (born OR birth*)
(July 2003)
The Advanced search page is almost the same, except for the same decrease in language options as on the home page and an addition of a "File type" search that allows "All file types" (the default), or HTML pages only or PDF files only.
AltaVista is refreshing its pages much more frequently ("50% of displayed results daily") and results now include PDF files (joining the ranks of Google and AllTheWeb in covering that formerly "invisible web" realm). The size of the database is now up to 1.3 billion.
The usual "third interface" page that AltaVista is inevitably drawn to, or renames, or withdraws, or introduces, etc. (Remember Live Topics, Refine, Power Search, Raging Search, Search Assistant?) is once more present in a modest form, now called "More Precision", which just provides boxes for simplified Boolean: "All these words," "any of these words," "none of these words," and "this exact phrase." This page is gotten to by the "More Precision" "query builder" link to the right of the search box on the main page.
AltaVista is now back in the search engine
news wars, introducing AltaVista News 2.0. The News search page contains
headlines for several categories and links to headlines in 10 categories:
Top Stories, Business Entertainment/Culture, Finance, International, Lifestyle/Travel,
Science/Health, Sports, Technology, and United States. AltaVista
claims the " largest free, full-text news source," with continuous updates
and an archive of up to 30 days containing some very major news sources.
In spite of the size claim, AltaVista is providing considerably fewer
articles retrieved than either Google or AllTheWeb. For example, in a news
search on "Baku," AltaVista retrieved 20 articles, while AllTheWeb retrieved
85 (covering just about one week), and Google retrieved 270.
The news search page provides searching by news category, by region
and country, by either "all sources" or by any one of 14 of the majors
publications and newswires covered, and by timeframe (today/yesterday,
last 7 days, last 2 weeks, last 30 days, anytime). You can also sort by
relevance (the default) or by date. The News page is also available in
German (Choose the German AltaVista site to use this)
For some searches, on results pages you will see AltaVista "Shortcuts." These may appear when you search for certain categories of information: Auto, Celebrity Images, Directions, Downloads, Finance, Greeting Cards, Local Information, Maps, Movies, News, Recipes, Shopping, Weather, White Pages, Yellow Pages. If, for example, you search for the name of a city and also for certain words such as "directions," a shortcut will appear among your results that will lead to a MapQuest page. Look for these indicated by a little box with an arrow in it, just above the Web results.
In spite of the more trivial ("marketing
whiz" generated) changes such as colors and logo, some of the above changes
may be quite significant for the serious searcher. Fortunately, in
addition to its marketing people, AltaVista also has some top notch technical
people who are hard at work improving actual results.
(November 2002)
The categorization, which altaVista calls "Prisma," provides a list of categories based on the "12 most strongly associated words, phrases, names or concepts." The list of categories appear on results pages just under the search box and above the "Products and Services" ads and the regular Web results. The categories can be very useful as a way of sorting out your results and narrowing them, especially when your search terms may have ambiguous meanings or are applied in a variety of contexts.
If you click on one of the categories, terms that may not have been in your original query are automatically appended to your query and the new results are shown. The process can be repeated at this second level, further narrowing your search. A "Go back" link takes you back to your previous query.
The categorization only kicks in when your results contain primarily English language pages.
If you noticed that I said "re-joined" above,
it was a reference to the fact that AltaVista was the first major search
engine to apply this kind of technology to its public Web search engine.
For the old-timers, you may recall AltaVista's "Refine," that provided a
very nice graphic representation of results clustered on the basis of occurrence
of search terms. AltaVista removed the feature in 1999. (July 2002)
(If it had truly just been ANDing results,
the first answer should have been the same as the third. Overall,
the automatic phrase identification should improve relevancy most of the
time.)
(July 2002)
3. - Raging Search is no longer available .
(June, 2001, modified July 2002)
The Photos search is done by means of Excite's metasearch and produces only a very small proportion of images compared to Google or AllTheWeb..
The Directory search searches Excite's own rather small directory.
(ESG2 pages 85, 91-93) (November 2001,
modified July 2002) .
Excite is dropping most of its European portals.
Excite has announced that, in July (2001), it will close down all of its European portal operations except Excite Italia and Excite UK. Excite itself (the main version) will of course continue to be available. [Editor's note: This is indicative of my suspicion that many of the country-specific sites provided by search engines such as Excite, AltaVista, and Lycos, get much less use in those countries than might be the case. Comments from users of country specific sites would be appreciated. Email me .]
(ESG 2, page 97)
(June, 2001)
AllTheWeb -(formerly FastSearch)
- AllTheWeb and Google are now almost tied as to the size of their Web databases. For a brief moment in August (2003) AllTheWeb reported a larger Web database than Google, but Google quickly came back with a couple hundred thousand new listings. As of August 30, AllTheWeb reports 3,151,743,117 and Google reports 3,307,998,701. (August 2003)
- You can now use AllTheWeb to perform Imperial/Metric Conversions - If you need to find conversions between these measurement systems, AllTheWeb's search box makes it easy. Enter the word "convert" followed immediately by a colon, then a space and the number and unit you want to convert. To convert 73.4 miles, for example, enter
convert: 73.4 mi
It works for all common units of length, time, speed, temperature, weight, area, and volume between both systems and either the full term or abbreviations and singular or plural units can be used. For details, try one, then, on the results page, click on the "Conversion Calculator Reference" link.
The conversion calculator goes along nicely with another of AllTheWeb's "hidden" features, a numerical calculator – If you need to know the product of 456 and 56.98, just enter 46*56.98, hit the search button, and you have your answer. For addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and exponents use, respectively, +, -, *, /, and ^. You can also nest using parentheses, e.g., 15*(14+43)
- AllTheWeb has added a neat little feature called "URL Investigator." Type a URL (e.g., extremesearcher.com) into the search box and AllTheWeb will show you links to the owner, to pages that link to the site, that contain the URL phrase, and to The WayBack Machine archive entries for the site, plus the language, date last changed, document size, etc. (April 2003)
- As well as now indexing PDF files, AllTheWeb is now indexing Word files and Flash content it finds on pages it crawls. (December 2002)
- Only a couple weeks after AllTheWeb announced Flash indexing (see below), it has added even more options to its Advanced Search page:
- Under the Domain Filters section of the page, you will now see the "Limit to region" option which allows you to limit your results to only those pages from a particular region of the world (a feature that HotBot and AltaVista have had for several years.)
- Document Depth Filtering. Another feature pioneered by HotBot, but with a very important difference --- On AllTheWeb it actually works. Limiting your results to only top level, or perhaps second level, pages can be an effective way of getting more relevant results, particularly if your search results in a lot of hits.
- Personal Homepage search - This limits results to only personal home pages, identified by AllTheWeb by the tilde " ~ " in the URL . The approach is approximate, since many personal homepages, such as those on Geocities, do not contain a tilde.
Another change that you will see is that the page descriptions on results pages do not come from the Description metatag or the first portion of the page as used to be the case for many engines, but comes from the text surrounding the retrieved terms. Those who have been around information retrieval for a while recognize this as what has been called KWIC (Key Word In Context) for several decades. The new term you will find being used these days is "snippets." Indeed probably a more "user-friendly" term. Also, AllTheWeb is now "bolding" the search terms in the description, making results easier to scan.
(October 2002)
- AllTheWeb is making further inroads into making the invisible Web visible. In the past, any text that was included in Flash "objects" on a page was not indexed. So if that fancy looking animated portion of the page contained valuable information, that information was not indexed unless it also appeared elsewhere on the page as regular text. AllTheWeb is now indexing these Flash presentations and also, on AllTheWeb's Advanced Search page, you can specify that you want only pages containing Flash, or containing images, audio (midi, wav, au), Java applets, video (mov, qt, avi), JavaScript, RealVideo and RealAudio, Java applets, video (mov, qt, avi), JavaScript, and VBScript.
The ability to limit to those features is however, very secondary to the searchability that has now been added. The former will be of interest to Web page designers and some others, but for the ordinary searcher, when looking for a topic, we do not care whether the word was in text, Flash, etc. The indexing is a very significant step forward in being able to retrieve what was before not retrievable. Congratulations again to the Fast (AllTheWeb) people who continue to move forward with speed and innovation. (September, 2002)
- AllTheWeb's size is now 2.1 billion Web pages, back again in second position behind Google's 2.5 billion, but large enough to make it worthwhile to use both whenever you need to aim for an exhaustive search. For any search involving more than a handful of results, AllTheWeb will almost always find some that Google does not. (September 2002)
- If you are puzzled by the "IP address Filters" box on AllTheWeb's Advanced Page, remember this: - you can forget it. It is mainly there "just because they could do it." In trying to get a step ahead of the spammers, they recognized that a lot of spam comes from some sites that are identifiable fairly easily by their IP addresses. If you should want to make the effort, you could eliminate your favorite spammer sites.
(January 2002)
- AllTheWeb is now doing "real-time" indexing of news stories , gathering stories within minutes of when they appear on the newswires themselves. It gathers items from over 3,000 sources and is currently indexing up to 800 stories per minute. This is not only a very significant step forward in terms of Web search engine freshness, but also provides the kind of cross-file searching that news searchers have been yearning for. A number of sites have covered multiple newswires, but this also incorporates hundreds of newspapers. For a regular search, AllTheWeb displays the first two news items at the top of its results page, with a link to additional stories. If you enter your search, then choose "News" under the main query box before clicking "Search," your results will be limited to news. Click on "Advanced Search" and you have the advanced news search page that allows you the regular advanced options (language, domain, number of results per page) plus special news search options (news "sections"). Time frame choices here are at the level of hours and days.
In addition to the freshness of the news items, AllTheWeb is now updating its Web catalog every 9-11 days. (Google updates its catalog approximately every 28 days.)
url: To search for words in a URLCustomization options have also changed. In addition to the adult filter, language settings, and number of word filters, you can also customize the following:
The following were options on the Customize page, but are no longer there:
- the default catalog to be searched (Web pages, News, Pictures, Videos, MP3 files FTP files)
- the option of having either "Language or "Search type" (any of the words, all of the words, phrase) as the pull-down window on the main search page.
- Turning of the "autocomplete" option in your browser location window.
- having AllTheWeb automatically "re-write" your query (adding quotes around common phrases that are found in AllTheWeb's phrase dictionary and removing common words)
- highlighting hit terms
- clustering or unclustering ("collapsing") results from the same site.
- number of results per page
- opening results in a new browser window
- displaying search tips
- displaying "sidebar results" -- the box on results pages that shows the number of hits from the other AllTheWeb catalogs (pictures, videos, etc.)
- integrating the news results on results pages and the number of news items to show at the top of results pages.
(December 2001, modified May 2002) ( ESG2, pages 101, 105, 109)
- Though the easiest way to search various fields in AllTheWeb is to take advantage of the Advanced Search Page, AllTheWeb also allows fields to be searched by the use of a collection of prefixes:
Examples: url:utexas
url:utexas.edusite: To search for all or part of a URL
Examples: site:edu
site:ssu.edu
site:students.ssu.edu
The above two prefixes work almost identically, though it is recommended that if you use "site:", it should be combined with another term, e.g., plagiarism site:edu
link: - To search for pages that link to a specific page
(August 2001, Revised August 2003) ( ESG2, pages 106-107)Example: link:ilo.org
title: - To search for words in the title of the page
Example: title:camera
language: - To restrict results to a specific language
Example: language:french
filesize: - To limit your results to only those pages that are of a particular size
Remember that the default search in AllTheWeb is not to "all languages", but to your local language(s). If you want the above to work, click the "Any Language" button on the home page or Advanced Search page.
Examples: filesize:[5000;10000]
filesize:<10000
filesize:>5000
filetype: - To limit results to those in PDF, Flash, or MS Word formats
You will probably want to just use the corresponding option on the Advanced Search page.
Examples: filetype:pdf
filetype:word
filetype:flash
- FastSearch has now taken the new name of "AllTheWeb." Not surprising, since that has been its URL since the beginning. It has also redesigned the homepage, replacing the "Search Options" box ("all the words," any of the words," "the exact phrase") with a language box. The only other significant change on the homepage has been that the link to "Multimedia Search" has been replaced by "Pictures" and "Videos" links. It is also providing a list of "popular searches." The advanced page has not changed except for the name and the color scheme.
On results pages, you will find several changes:
- News headlines (that match words in your query
- A list of related searches under "Narrow your search."
- There is a "toggle" link to turn the adult filter ("offensive content reduction") on and off
- There is a "Search tip" displayed in a box on the right.
- A link is provided to corresponding results from AllTheWeb multimedia collections
FastSearch is also reporting that they are updating their database much more frequently. For a more detailed look at this see Gary Price's article on Searchenginewatch.com .
(July, 2001)
- In it's "less-publicized-than-merited" race with AllTheWeb in providing additional features beyond ordinary Web searching, Google has produced a calculator and unit conversion feature that tries and probably succeeds in doing AllTheWeb one or more better. For its numerical calculator, as with AllTheWeb's, if you need to know the product of 456 and 56.98, just enter 46*56.98, hit the search button, and you have your answer. For addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and exponents use, respectively, +, -, *, /, and ^. You can also nest using parentheses, e.g., 15*(14+43). However with Google, you can do roots, trigonometric functions, logarithms, and factorials, and several other operations. For details, see Google's calculator help screen .
For unit conversions (e.g., feet to meters), Google stresses the lack of necessity to use a syntax. Google uses a "free text' approach that seems to work well. If you want to convert 32 meters to feet. try entering whatever seems natural, such as "32 feet to meters" or "32 ft to m". You can also combine calculations with conversions, e.g., "3*32 ft in m"
(September 2003)
- Google has increased the size of its database by over 200 million records. In the context of Google's total of over 3 billion records, that may not seem like much. But to add a little perspective, it was only about 4 years ago that Northern Light had the largest of all Web databases with an overall total of only 200 million pages. (August 2003)
- Google has added 5 country specific news collections to its News page. Click on the News tab on the main page, then go down to the bottom of the page, where you will see " International versions of Google News available in: Australia - Canada - India - New Zealand - U.K. - U.S." Clicking on one of these will take you to a Google news page that contains both general news items and country-specific news items. (May 2003)
- Google introduces Froogle (froogle.com). Froogle (clever name, eh?) a cousin of Google's under-recognized Google Catalogs (catalog.google.com) that includes the content of over 5,000 catalogs. However, Froogle goes beyond just listing the content of catalogs, and includes content that (1) is the result of Google's crawling of the Web to identify product sites and (2) content submitted by merchants. On Froogle's home page you will see a search box, a link to the Advanced Froogle Search page, and a directory that allows you to browse for products by category. Ranking of results is not dependent upon payment for listings, but relies on the same ranking technology used at Google.com. Merchants cannot buy search results listings but can buy "Sponsored Links" that are placed elsewhere on the results page. Unlike most other shopping sites, no purchases are made through Froogle directly. Actually, you will find that Froogle results may include items from other shopping sites such as eBay, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, etc. (Note that only one matching item per store is displayed, but you can click the "all products regardless of store" link to see others.)
Froogle's Advanced Search page allows you to search by simple Boolean, price range, category, and also limit your search to product name or description. On results pages you can also narrow your search by category and price range. (January 2003)
- Google has officially (on 9/23/02) launched its news service , which has been in beta for several months (and Google is still referring to it as being in beta. Eternally beta may not be bad, it may be betta than beta.). Moving "one-up" on AllTheWeb's news service,
- Google's news covers over 4,000 sources (vs. AllTheWeb's 3,000), including biggies like the NY Times and small-town newspapers as well.
- Google , like AllTheWeb's service, is near real-time.
- Google is now retaining its records for 30 days (vs. AllTheWeb's 5 days or so).
There is now a News tab on Google's main page, but unlike AllTheWeb, Google at present does not have an Advanced News Search. Knowing Google, it will probably be along very shortly.As with AllTheWeb, when you do a regular search, Google automatically does a search on the news and puts matching headlines (up to three of them) at the top of your results list.
On Google's News page, in addition to the news search box, you will see:
For each item displayed on the News page or on news search results pages, there are links to other news sources that have carried the same or similar stories. On results pages you will see an option to sort by date or relevance.
- Headlines chosen by a Google algorithm that is "based on many factors including how often and on what sites a story appears elsewhere on the Web." Google emphasizes that the whole news compilation process is done without the intervention of human editors.
- Seven news categories. What articles go into which category is also done algorithmically.
Take advantage of both Google's and AllTheWeb's (and lots of other sites') news search services --- and remember the big bucks that you used to have to pay for this kind of news.
(September 2002)
- In its continuing crusade to make the "Invisible Web" more visible, Google has introduced a "Catalog" search, that provides extensive search capabilities for hundreds of consumer catalogs. The catalog can be accessed from Google's Advanced Search page (look under "Topic-Specific Search") or by going directly to catalogs.google.com .
Browsing using the categories on the main catalog page:
- On the main Catalog Search page, you can browse using ten categories or you can use the search box to search by topic or by catalog name
- Catalogs are listed alphabetically and there is a small pull-down window near the top of the page that allows you to pick a specific alphabetic range of catalog names to go to.
- Clicking on the catalog name or the image of the catalog cover will take you to a thumbnail view of about thirty pages
- Clicking on one of those pages takes you to a larger image of the page
- When you get to that page level, you will also find Google's catalog navigation bar on the page.
Navigation Bar
The catalog navigation bar:
- Appears on all page view screens
- Gives the catalog's date, phone number, URL and catalog code
- Provides a Previous and Next arrow to go from page to page
- Provides options of three page-views: single, double, thumbnail
- Provides a "Jump to page" box allowing you to go to a specific page by number
- Gives a search box
Google also provides an Advanced Catalog Search page that allows:
To order, Google recommends calling the phone number given for the catalog, or you can go the the URL given.
- Simplified Boolean (all of the words, any of the words, without the words) and a phrase search
- Searching within a specific category
- Searching within a specific catalog
- Search of all catalogs or only current ones.
- Adult filter ("SafeSearch")
Happy Shopping - And continue to be amazed by the great new things the folks out at Googleplex keep coming up with!
(ESG2, page 121, January 2002)
- Google now allows the use of an asterisk for "wildcard" words (not to be confused with "truncation"). In the past you could use stopwords to accomplish the same thing, but since "the" (and "OR") are now the only stopwords, "the" would have been used to accomplish this (See ESG2 , page 117.)
Example: "erasmus the the rotterdam" will retrieve "Erasmus University of Rotterdam"
Now you can, more simply, use the asterisk for "unknown" words in a phrase search. As with the previous use of stopwords to allow for variable words (proximity), the use of each asterisk insists on the presence of one word. For example:
"erasmus * rotterdam"
If you want "Franklin Roosevelt" and also "Franklin D Roosevelt" and also "Franklin Delano Roosevelt", you would search for:
will retrieve "Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam" and "Erasmus von Rotterdam"
It will not retrieve most of the "Erasmus Rotterdam" records (if there were any)."erasmus * * rotterdam"
will retrieve "Erasmus University of Rotterdam"
but not most of the "Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam" records
"Franklin Roosevelt" OR "Franklin * Roosevelt"(January 2002) ( ESG2, page 117) [Thanks to Gary Price for alerting me to this via his Virtual Acquisition Shelf .]
- Google is now indexing over 3 billion [this number updated here as of Spring 2003] Web pages, plus 700 million newsgroup postings (now going back 20 years), 330 million images , and several million PDF, Word, Excel, and other documents. The newsgroup postings represent the entire UseNet archive.
The news postings come from a variety of newswires. The first three news matches are shown at the top of results pages. Additional matches are integrated into the regular Google results listing. Google indexes its news sources on a daily basis, which would be impressive, except for the fact that AllTheWeb is now indexing a greater number of news sources on a near "real-time" basis. The number of news sources indexed by Google is also considerably smaller than those indexed by AllTheWeb. Also unlike AllTheWeb, Google does not provide any capability for searching only the news.
(December 2001) ( ESG2, Chapter 6)
- Good news on the "stopword" front -- Google has abolished all stopwords except "the" and "or" from its stopword list. You can now search "erasmus of rotterdam" just as you would ordinarily write it, since "of" is no longer a stopword. You no longer have to
use the plus sign to force a search of the couple dozen or so words that were formerly not searchable directly."Or" is still a special case. If you want to use it as the OR Boolean operator, capitalize it. If you want it as part of a phrase, put the phrase in quotes. If you enter it without quotes and in lower case, it will be ignored.red OR black gets all the red and all the black
"red or black" gets that exact phrase
red or black the or is ignored and you get the same results as if you had entered it without the orYou can still fake proximity, and allow for a variable word(s), by taking advantage of the special treatment of "the." See ESG2, page 117, but use "the" as the "stand-in" word.
- Google continues it forays into the invisible Web - - Not only is it now indexing PDF files (see below), but it now indexes a variety of other document formats it finds links to on Web pages, including: Adobe PostScript (ps)
- Lotus 1-2-3 (wk1, wk2, wk3, wk4, wk5, wki, wks, wku)
- Lotus WordPro (lwp)
- MacWrite (mw)
- Microsoft Excel (xls)
- Microsoft PowerPoint (ppt)
- Microsoft Word (doc)
- Microsoft Works (wks, wps, wdb)
- Microsoft Write (wri)
- Rich Text Format (rtf)
- Text (ans, txt)
You won't yet run cross a lot of these, since they don't actually occur that frequently on Web pages. For most of these file types, Google has indexed, at present, from a hundred thousand to a couple million documents.If you have the urge to locate any of these specific file types, the easiest way is by using the "File Format" option on Google's Advanced Search page. If you are addicted to prefixes, along with the est of your search, use the "filetype:" prefix with the file extensions as shown above, for example:filetype: pptAs with the PDF files, another nice feature that Google provides is the option of viewing the contents of these files in HTML format as well as the "native" format. Very useful if you don't have the corresponding software such as MS Word. Just click on the "View as HTML" link in the record.Be aware that Google does not do any virus detection on these.
- Google has redesigned its home page and made a number of options more prominent. Links to the Google Groups search and the directory (Open Directory) were already shown on the home page, but the link to the Image Search was not as accessible. All three are now given more prominence as tabs above the search box (on the main page and most other pages.)
The Preferences and language options are now also more easily accessible. Instead of just a link for Preferences, there are now links to Preferences and Language Tools (with some overlap). The Preferences link leads to the following options:Language Tools provides:
- Language search and interface preference
- # of results per page
- Option to have results opened in new window
- Safe Search option (adult content filter)
- A search box with windows to limit retrieval to a specific language or a specific country-of-origin.
- A box for translating a specific Web page between English and five languages (French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, or Russian) or between French and German.
- Choice of having the Google interface in any one of over 60 languages.
- Links to the Google country-specific versions for 23 countries.
(October 2, 2001, ESG2. pages 112-113)
- Google's newsgroup search is now available directly from its homepage. For those who don't already know, Google took over the defunct deja.com database and quickly got it up and going. Google rapidly added enhancements and now has all or virtually all of the functionality of the old deja.com -- plus an easier interface, since deja.com had, during its last couple years, pretty well obscured the newsgroup search in favor of an obviously unsuccessful shopping-oriented homepage, leading to its decline (Sic semper stupidity.)
The groups are browsable by hierarchy and extensively searchable, particularly by using the Advanced search option that allows searching by hierarchy, by date, language, Boolean, etc. Threads are easy to follow and after registering, you can easily post to groups. Google provides extensive help screens for Groups, including one that relates former deja functions to Google Groups functions. The database goes back to 1995. Google Groups is now THE way to search newsgroups. (July 2001)- Date searching is now available on Google's Advanced Search page . You can only search by broad time frames (anytime, last 3 months, last 6 months, past year), but it is a step in the right direction and eliminates a fairly obvious weakness in Google's field searching capabilities.
- Google is no longer searching the Realnames database and incorporating the RealNames company record into results pages (ESG2, page 120)
- Google now has image searching. To get to it, look for the "Image Search" box on Google's Advanced page. At the moment, it is retrieving somewhat fewer images than does FastSearch, but the gap seems to have been narrowing since it was first released. There is much less search functionality than in either AltaVista's or FastSearch's image searching, but, knowing Google, this is also likely to change soon. At the moment, you receive 20 thumbnails, and when you click on the image, you are taken to the actual site, but in a Google frame (which can be removed by a link at the top of the page.
- Translations are now available. For pages where the original language is Italian, French, Spanish, German, or Portuguese, you will see a link to "Translate this Page." Clicking on that will take you directly to a translated page (unlike AltaVista which inserts and additional required step.) From Google's Preferences page, you can also specify that non -English results listings automatically be translated into English.
- A phone book lookup can now be done on Google, directly from the search box.
For a business, type a business name and either city and state or zip code.
For individuals, give the first name or initial, the last name, and either state, area code or zip. It will also work without either the first name or initial.
- PDF (Adobe Portable Document Format) Files on Google. Formerly, this type of file was pretty strictly a part of the "invisible Web," and not identifiable or retrievable by general Web search engines. Google now makes over 26 million of these files accessible
In Google results pages, you will recognize these by [PDF] in the file names.[PDF] www.marketdirect.org/gdf2000/iran.pdf
To limit your search to just PDF, use inurl:pdf as part of your query. Clicking on the main link in results records will cause your Acrobat Reader to appear, with the PDF file. Clicking on the "Text version" link will display a text version in your regular browser window.
(June, 2001)
- Google has launched a Canadian version at www.google.ca . It is supposed to focus more on Canadian content, but the only really obvious difference is the option on the homepage for either the French or English versions of the interface. Search results seem to be the same for this and Google's main version.
HotBot News and Changes
- A database by any other name . . . : The four databases that HotBot allows you to search (see below) were initially, when HotBot introduced its new interface at the end of 2002, referred to as Inktomi, Fast, Google, and Teoma. HotBot is still providing access to the very same databases, but is now referring to three of them by more recognizable names. Inktomi is now referred to as "HotBot," Teoma as "Ask Jeeves" and Fast as "Lycos." Substantively, nothing has changed. Inktomi has always been the database behind the original HotBot, the Fast database is the one behind both AllTheWeb and Lycos, and AskJeeves uses the Teoma database. This change in nomenclature will indeed give a lot of users a better ideea of what's going on. (July 2003)
- For the first time since 1997, HotBot has made significant changes in its interface, and they are very significant.
- The old main page interface, with several pull-down windows for basic search features, is gone.
- The new interface has a single search box, but with radio buttons allowing your search to be done in either the FAST (AllTheWeb's) database, Google's database, Inktomi (HotBot's old, main database), or Teoma. Results will show the first ten records from the selected database (with the usual links at the bottom to get to the rest of the results), and a few "sponsored links" (ads) at the top. The latter remain the same, regardless of which database you searched. The records are all in a "HotBot" format, with the page title, about two lines of description, the URL, and the page size (in KB). You do NOT get the numerous additional output and features that you will find if you search Google, AllTheWeb, or Teoma directly.
- The Advanced Search link is where the real innnovation has occured, with a page that looks like the old HotBot Advanced page, but contains sections that are tailored to the capabilities of the original engine being searched, allowing you to take advantage of the specific field searching available in that engine, and other features such as offensive content reduction. Once you have filled out the form, and search the first database, all you need to do is click on the radio button for another database and the search is transferred to it. If any of the "fields", for example, that you specified are not supported by the new database you selected, the search will still be done, but you will receive a message that the specific feature is not supported there.
This is not a "metasearch engine" (at least not like other metasearch engines). It does not combine results of the target engines, it does not limit your retreiveal to the first ten records a metaserch engines do, etc. What it is can probably be best described as a "common interface" for several engines.Advantages of the New HotBot- It allows a quick and easy comparison of search results for three major and one minor search engine (Teoma).
- It allows the user to vary easily take advantage of powerful advanced search options (such as field searching) in each of those engines without dealing with rather different interfaces for each. Very important to the serious searcher.
Disadvantages of the New HotBot
- Results are watered down. You only get the "plain vanilla" display for each record and do not see the numerous and very valuable special features that each of the engines provides when you search them directly.
Try it, see what you think, and if you have a moment, let me know what you think. (Ran ) December 2002
- Left-hand truncation is gone again . (March 2002)
Lycos News and Changes
- Lycos announced, on July 1, 2002, its new Version 6.0. With a gigantic Web database, good search functionality (on its Advanced Search page), and a good portal interface, Lycos is definitely back in the Web search engine game. Actually, most of the changes had already been in effect for a while, but they are changes that every serious searcher should be aware of. Most importantly, for a while now, Lycos has been using the FAST (AllTheWeb) database.
Lycos, in its press release , claims it is the world's "Largest Full-Text Catalog on the Internet" So, if it is using the same database as AllTheWeb, isn't it tied for 1st place? Probably so, for all practical purposes. Some benchmarking shows that, for searches done on both, the number of results usually aren't identical but almost so (within 1-2%: 92 vs. 94, 31,805 vs. 31,178, 186 vs.186). Sometimes Lycos has a handful more, sometimes AllTheWeb does.
Also as a consequence of using the AllTheWeb database, you will now find PDF files among search results.
Using the FAST database also puts it at the top in terms of "freshness," with the database being refreshed every seven days, vs about twice that for Google (according to Lycos.)
The appearance of the home page changed a few months ago, with considerable reorganization of the page. Most of the choices that were available as shown in the 2nd edition of ESG are still there, just in different places on the screen.
Lycos is now (along with almost every other search engine) "clustering" its results, listing only the first (most relevant) page from any particular Website, with a "More results from" link to get to additional pages from the site.
Search terms from your query are now being highlighted.
The Lycos press release indicates that the FAST news database of 3,000 sources, refreshed every minute, is being used. At the moment, however, this seems not to have kicked in, since identical searches on the two engines produces a very significantly smaller set of results on Lycos vs. AlltheWeb.
"Fast Forward" - On results pages you will now find a "Fast Forward" option next to the title of each result. Clicking on this will bring up a window with that page on the right and a "condensed" version of the Lycos search results on the left.
Lycos' Advanced Search provides rather extensive searching functionality, including field searching (title, URL, link-to, language), and simple Boolean (Must Include, Should Include, Must Not Include).
So, since Lycos and AllTheWeb produce such similar results, how do you decide which to use:
Use Lycos when:
You want a "portal" with lots of features other than just Web searching.
Use AllTheWeb, when:
You like a simple search interface.
You want to do an image search.
You need to do a news search, especially if you want an Advanced News Search interface.Lycos has the potential of being the leading "portal-oriented" search engine. However, though the Lycos home page can be personalized, the resulting page is too cluttered with ads and other "non-content," including an un-deletable "On Lycos Now" ad section and a large ad across the bottom of the page. Less than 40% of the Lycos personalized page is devoted to content. This leaves "My Yahoo" and Excite as the best personaliazble portal interfaces.
(July 2002)
- Lycos has radically re-designed its home page. If you look closely, however, there is virtually nothing there that was not there before and nothing that was there before that is not there now.
- "Connect," and "Find," and "Connect" links are now in the upper left-hand corner under "Tools." Lycos' Top 50 has moved to a more prominent location near the bottom of the page.
- "Lycos Topics, " its collection of Channels/Directory, is now very attractively placed in the left column .
- "Shopping" is still central both in terms of prominence and proximity
(ESG page 140-141) (December 2001)
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Northern Light News and Changes
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- Northern Light has announced that its free Web search will be discontinued as of January 16, 2002. This is very sad news for all serious searchers. "Enterprise" customers will continue to have access to the 350 million pages in its Web index.
A few (but important) remnants will remain available free to the public:
- Northern Light's Special Collection of over 70 million documents
- News Search (56 newswires)
- Special Editions
- Advanced search pages
For full details, see Northern Light's press release.
Yahoo Changes
- Yahoo has introduced a new product search engine (Look for "Product Search" on Yahoo's home page or go to Yahoo Shopping at shopping.yahoo.com). You will find that this looks a lot like Google's product search engine, Froogle , with product pictures, brief descriptions, and links to the Web page on which the product was found. The contents of Yahoo's product database come both fom Yahoo-affiliated merchants (those who sell products directly through Yahoo's shopping site) and products that are found by crawling the Web. According to Yahoo, ranking of product search results is done independently of any payments by the advertiser. Ads relevant to the search are placed on the right side of the results page. There is an advanced search page that allows you to apply simple Boolean ("all of these words", "any of these words", "none of these words") and specfy that your terms be treated as a phrase. You can also limit your results to any one of thirteen product categories and to a specific price range. The categories and price range limits are also available on all results pages, as is an option to sort results by price.
Also look on results pages for a variety of other useful links. For some products you will find, next to the product description, "Shopping Tools" links for "Compare Prices", "Full Specs" and "User Reviews". You may find an "open book" icon that provides a link to a buyers guide. Many products are also assigned a one-to-five star rating bsed on purchasers' evaluations.
The number of results you will typically find is much much lower than you will find for the same product searched in Froogle. However, Yahoo's new product search is brand new and you can expect a lot of rapid growth. (September 2003)
- Be aware that now when you do a "search" on Yahoo, it will give you Google results for "Web pages" (but without the many nice additional features you will find if you do the search on Google itself.
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- Yahoo has redesigned its home page, with a number of cosmetic changes, but also in a way that makes its portal features more obvious. As a matter of fact, the directory itself is now placed below the fold, with the portal features above the fold. This is particularly interesting, since for the serious searcher, it is the portal features that are probably more important. For myself, I practically never use Yahoo for a "search," and only occasionally as a "directory," I do though use it as my start page because of its excellent personalizable portal and I use Yahoo Groups and a number of other features. When you have time, spend a half-hour or so (you may find yourself spending much longer) looking at the other features found on Yahoo's home page. Yahoo Groups, particularly, are tremendously valuable. (September 2002)
- Yahoo has streamlined its results pages. When "searching," only the first six matching categories are shown, with a link leading to any additional categories. This allows "site matches" to always be more obvious, regardless of how many categories matched. In the past, if there were many categories, you needed to click on "Web Sites" before you got to specific site listings.
The Web Site Listings themselves are also streamlined, looking now much more like results in a search engine. Formerly, for each listing you were shown the whole hierarchy of categories in which the hits occurred, then a link to the site itself, with a very brief description. You now get a longer description and, at the end of the record, a link to the category.
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For example:3.Green-e Renewable Electricity Program - offers information on renewable electricity
options when looking for an electricity service provider.
http://www.green-e.org
More sites about: Renewable Energy > OrganizationsOccasionally, the first site(s) listed may be "sponsored" (one of the search engine world's many euphemisms for "paid listings") Commendably, Yahoo clearly distinguishes these by a "Sponsored" heading, by not making them look too similar to the other listings, and also by placing them in a yellow box. Yahoo also provides a "What's a Sponsored Site?" link that straightforwardly explains this. [A much better approach than you've seen in some other services at times. Always keep in mind that without ads we would not have most of the search and directory services we have.]
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Browsing Through Yahoo Categories:
When browsing through categories, you may also see similarly presented Sponsored sites, plus, for long lists, both a list of "Most Popular" sites and an alphabetic list.
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The old "menu" that linked to Categories, Web Sites, Web Pages, and News is still there, but less obvious and presented just by links instead of the previously more prominent menu bar.
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Summary | Categories | Web Sites | Web Pages | NewsYahoo's new approach should indeed make results easier to use, without sacrificing anything really significant. Nicely done.
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(October 3, 2001, ESG2. pages 178-180)
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