Alta Vista coverage much smaller than thought?

[Katrina N. Magnuson]

Robert C. Williford wrote:
> 
> This was no surprise to me, since three students here at the University
> of Missouri-Columbia School of Library and Informational Science (since
> graduated) wrote a book based on their in-depth analysis of search
> engines.  They gave a presentation to us about 3 months ago--maybe
> longer.  One of their conclusions was that web designers should make
> their sites wide and shallow (in terms of hierarchy, not content!),
> since some search engines only look at the top few levels--believe four
> deep was about the max.  This is counter-intuitive to good graphic
> design, where you might want to have a nice intro screen (first level),
> which links to a table of contents (level 2), which links to an intro
> page about some info item (level 3), which then offers another page of
> links to real information (level 4).  By the time you get to the gems of
> information, you're deeper than the search engines' knowbots ever dug.
> Probably didn't get "catalogued."
> 
> I only recall the name of one author, David E. Moxley, who's at
> David_E._Moxley at muccmail.missouri.edu.  Believe that the title of the
> book is "Neal Schuman Authoritative Web Searching."  I know the ISBN is
> supposed to be 1-55570-307-0.  It should be out in late May, but I think
> Neal Schuman is already taking orders.
> 
> Obviously, I haven't seen the book, but the presentation I saw had lots
> of solid info that was really eye-opening.
> 
> Bob Williford
> SLIS Student
> University of Missouri-Columbia

FYI.

Title: Neal-Schuman's Authoritative Web Searching
Authors: Susan Maze, David Moxley, Donna Smith
ISBN: 1-55570-370-0 (June, 1997)

I attended a presentation on Commercial Search Engines by the authors at
an SLA Intranet Workshop a few weeks ago.  VERY interesting and
thought-provoking (see Bob's comments above re: the level of indexing by
most search engines).  This book is definitely on my buy list.

-- 
Katrina Magnuson, Technical Support Librarian
Gardner, Carton & Douglas
Suite 3200, 321 N. Clark Street, Chicago, IL  60610
voice: 312-245-8871  fax: 312-644-3381
email: kmagnuson at gcd.com -or- katrina at anet-chi.com