StratSoy Support

Selected Search Engine Information:

: Alta Vista began as a way for Digital Corporation to show off some new technology - their new line of Alpha servers. Alta Vista came online last December and has been handling more than two million hits a day. If its claim to more than 30 million fully indexed pages is accurate, it wins bragging rights as the largest of the Web-search databases. FTP sites and Gopher sites are not included in searches, but Newsgroups are included. You cannot refine search results, but it does offer case-sensitive searching. It uses Boolean or similar operators in its advanced searching routines.
: BigBook, Inc. was founded in 1995 to build a whole new kind of Yellow Pages. A Yellow Pages that would include all the business information that consumers need - and features to let them get to the information quickly and easily. At the same time, BigBook helps local businesses provide details about their products and services, cost-free. BigBook makes it easier for consumers and businesses to hook up with each other, and provides "value-added" information to help consumers make better, more informed decisions.
: The Electric Library is the best way for students and families to do research. The content is as safe as a local public library, and the information it contains is always up-to-date. The Electric Library is updated daily via satellite! With The Electric Library, any person can pose a question in plain English and launch a comprehensive, simultaneous search through more than 150 full-text newspapers, nearly 800 full-text magazines, two international news wires, two thousand classic books, hundreds of maps, thousands of photographs, as well as major works of literature and art. But it all costs. This information is only available by subscription. A 30-day free trial is available.
: Infoseek's free Internet search and news services are the most popular ones on the Net today, receiving over 5 million information requests per day from over 1 million unique Internet users worldwide. Infoseek is regarded as the most effective online media buy today.
: From their own news release, "Beginning May 29, users of the Lycos Internet service will access the Lycos "CentiSpeed" search technology, which processes a search dramatically faster than preceding technologies. CentiSpeed features include Virtual Memory Control, User-Level Fault Handling and Algorithmic Word Compaction, and allow the enriched engine to execute up to 2,000 queries per second on each of the companys servers, thereby providing the potential for unlimited scalability and the fastest-known searching on the web today." New features on Lycos include Multimedia Spidering, Client-Side Image Mapping, Multi-Language Spidering, Authenticated Sites, and Cooperative Spidering.
: Magellan is the product of a marriage between McKinley's proprietary search technology and its unique editorial process. Sites in the Magellan guide are reviewed and rated by a highly informed editorial staff, with expertise in topical areas. The resulting site evaluations not only provide users with in-depth information, but also a human voice. Magellan recently introduced the concept of the "Green Light" indicator. Sites in Magellan bearing the Green Light icon have been identified as being free of adult-oriented content at the time of their review. In addition to the 40,000 reviewed and rated sites, Magellan contains over 15 million URLs.
: Architext Software's fast, full-text search covers more than 1.5 million indexed Web pages, or 50,000 reviewed sites. Or try a concept search. Concept searches will find a page related to the words you search on, even it those words are not actually on the Web page. It's like searching an index combined with a thesaurus. (BTW, what's another word for thesaurus? - Steven Wright) FTP sites and Gopher sites are not included in searches, but Newsgroups are included. You cannot refine search results, and it does not offer case-sensitive searching.
: Galaxy was begun in the summer of '93, and went online January '94. It's the oldest browsable/searchable web directory, and has always included a Gopher and Telnet directory in addition to the web information. Searching represents about one-half of the Web traffic at Galaxy. The index includes only those pages actually submitted to Galaxy. Periodically, Galaxy re-indexes sites linked to them. During this process, they discover (and fix, where possible) bad links. They also search for the "we have moved" sort of pages, and repair those entries.
: WebCrawler was the first full-text search engine on the Internet. Several competitors emerged within a year of WebCrawler's debut: Lycos, InfoSeek, and OpenText. They all improved on WebCrawler's basic functionality, though they did nothing revolutionary. WebCrawler's early success made their entry into the market easier, and legitimized businesses that today constitute a small industry in Web resource discovery.
: Yahoo! contains organized information on tens of thousands of computers linked to the Web. The San Jose Mercury news recently noted that "Yahoo is closest in spirit to the work of Linnaeus, the 18th century botanist whose classification system organized the natural world."