Catalog of the Internet

[Jeanne Crisp]

Many thanks to Alison O'Balle for sharing her colleagues' notes about 
Lycos.  (And to Dennis Dillon and Mark McFarland for creating the notes.)

I especially appreciate the brief description about what Lycos searches:

> 
> A simplified description of their cataloging program is that it looks at
> every word contained at a web site, tehn ranks the words by where and how
> they appear in the document, and indexes the most important words, it also
> looks at all the world links to your site to figure out how useful the site
> is.  Then it creates an abstract of the site based of the fuzzy logic and
> word weighting.
>

Here's my question: is there any place I can obtain similar simplified 
descriptions of many or all of the various searching tools?  I've read 
the 1995 article by Ian Winship in which he compares results of 
searching with different tools, but I still lack a good understanding of 
how to describe what Yahoo searches vs. what Webcrawler searches.

Thanks for any tips.

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Jeanne Crisp, Washington State Library
Olympia, Washington USA
jcrisp at wln.com
360-586-1677, FAX 360-586-1671  PST
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