Comparison Study for Search Engines

[Nick Arnett]

At 3:22 PM 11/20/95, elisabeth roche wrote:
>Thought you would be interested to know that as I did my Church Music search
>in Infoseek yesterday, the advertisement that appeared as a clickable logo
>on the top of the page was tied to my search terms, it was a Music Store,
>sales on the net.

Yep -- this sort of approach really puts pressure on the search services to
get the query right the first time, so that the advertising is truly
relevant.

>The future is now!! Don't forget glimpse either.

Glimpse is definitely interesting, but it's just one of many, many, many
search engines that have been developed over the years.  Search engines are
basically easy to build; but completing all of the related tools, making
them scale up in various dimensions (number of docs, number of users,
number of persistant searches) and other features are much harder.

There are something like 50 commercial search tool companies just in the
United States.  I don't know how many shareware and freeware engines there
are.

Please bear in mind the difference between a search service (such as
InfoSeek) and a search tools (such as Verity's Topic or U. Mass.' INQUERY).
The services use search engines.

Nick