New Internet Search Tool -Forwarded

[Dan Lester]

I'm forwarding this from buslib-l for comment. 
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dan

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Date:         Wed, 17 Apr 1996 05:03:15 -0400
Reply-To:     BUSLIB-L - Business Libraries Discussion List
              <BUSLIB-L at idbsu.idbsu.edu>, WRCrowley <wrcrowley at aol.com>
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From:         WRCrowley <wrcrowley at aol.com>
Organization: America Online, Inc. (1-800-827-6364)
Subject:      New Internet Search Tool
To:           Multiple recipients of list BUSLIB-L <BUSLIB-L at idbsu.idbsu.edu>

I have been advised by the free Internet magazine "Compunews" of a new
Internet search tool which is worth a bookmark.

Called "MetaCrawler" from the Univ. of Washington, this one combines
searches from the best of the other search engines.  With one search you
can utilize the catalogues and directories of:

AltaVista, Excite, Galaxy, Infoseek, Inktomi, Lycos, WebCrawler and Yahoo!

MetaCrawler runs each search engine, selects ONLY the TOP 10 HITS from
each search engine, then sorts out the duplicates and gives you a final
report.

Pluses--it is fairly fast (faster than other group searches), provides an
abstract, the URL and the source search engine (multiple if more than one
found that URL).  Its choice of search engines is very good.

Minuses--I haven't discovered how to do Boolean searching yet although it
seems to want to use "or" as the default, you only get the top ten hits
from each engine (often the gold nugget is number 14 on the hit list).  It
does not include the OpenText search engine.

It will save you time on a simple search with its broad reach.

Give it a try at  http://metacrawler.cs.washington.edu:8080/index.html

A search for "hydrogen sulfide" found 53 unique and useful sites.

Bill Crowley

W. R. Crowley
Competitive Analysis Technologies
Cypress, TX  77429
Phone 713-370-3846
Fax 713-376-6231