Performance of Infoseek

[Nick Arnett]

At 10:42 AM 11/13/95, "Ian Winship, Univ Northumbria Info Services"

>1. InfoSeek has extensively tested and benchmarked its precision recall
>   performance against other system and has consistently emerged better
>   than or equal to the top rated systems in TREC. This is based upon
>   hundreds of queries and professional relevance judgements.

Hmm.  Since InfoSeek didn't participate in TREC, I guess we can assume that
that they're using one of the engines that did well in some of the tests.
However, TREC doesn't rate search engines overall (in fact, one of the
rules of participation is that the participants aren't supposed to claim a
rating based on TREC).  The U. Mass. INQUERY engine did very well in TREC 4
(Verity didn't participate this time, I hasten to add).  In a nutshell,
TREC is complex, subjective and subject to interpretation.

This is not to say that InfoSeek doesn't have a very good search engine.
It does.

As for Lycos, its creator (Michael Mauldin) certainly never used to suggest
that its search facility was anything more than a quickly constructed basic
search routine -- and he recommended looking at Verity's engine to some of
his customers.  Lycos has nowhere near the capabilities of almost any
commercial search engine (or INQUERY).  Fuzzy's research was heavily
focused on the spider (data gathering) tools, not the search tools.  I
don't know if this has changed since Lycos was privatized.

Nick