From...

August 6, 1999
Web posted at: 9:14 a.m. EDT (1314 GMT)

by Alexandra Krasne

INTERACTIVE Do search engines usually find the information you were looking for? Yes No View Results

(IDG) -- The Web is so large that using a search engine to find that little tidbit of information is like using a phone book with most of the pages torn out, a 1999 study from New Jersey-based NEC Research Institute concludes.

Since no search engine indexes more than about a third of the "publicly indexable Web," your best bet, according to NEC's findings, is to combine the results of multiple search engines using a metasearch engine.

But most search engine companies are aware (although they're not publicly acknowledging) that there are limits to their products' network bandwidth, disk storage, computational power, or a combination of these. Four new (or improved) search engines--Ditto.com, TheBigHub.com, FAST Search, and Excite@Home--all boast exciting improvements to their search capabilities. All claim to be the best, fastest, easiest, and most authoritative search tool on the Web.

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A Word Is Worth a Thousand Pictures

Ditto.com, an image-based search engine that went live Monday, lets you enter a word or phrase, and in place of text it returns relevant thumbnail-size pictures. If you click on a picture, it expands on screen and wisks you to the Web page where the picture is hosted.

To test the site's effectiveness, the vague term, "personal computer" was plugged in and returned 1200 hits, complete with pictures of personal computers. Most the images, however, were computer protection devices, rather than personal computers themselves.

If you're looking for something lewd and offensive, or racial slurs, hate sites, and foul language, you won't be able to find it with the Ditto engine.

"It was a business decision," says John Treacy, vice president of marketing for Ditto.com. "A lot of businesses are tired of pornography. It's clearly a problem when you have kids using the service. Right now it's the right business decision."

More than 2 million images are in Ditto.com's index. During the "crawling" process, proprietary software and a group of researchers scour the Web for sites. The crawlers catalog their findings by image, although Ditto takes only about 4 percent of the information.

Jumping into the image-based search business, Internet portal Snap.com has implemented Ditto.com's service on its own site, which Ditto.com reports has already produced 3 million unique Ditto user sessions. Ditto has deals in the works with other major portals and search engines to implement the service.

I'm Fast, You're FASTer

"All the Web, All the Time" is the FAST search engine's catch phrase. After a decade of research, the Norwegian Institute of Technology has tried to optimize search algorithms and architectures to give you mathematically the best and most comprehensive search of the Web. FAST Search, or AlltheWeb.com, includes more than 200 million unique URLs in its database, and if you're looking for the biggest of search engines, this just might be it.

Searching on the generic term "personal computer," FAST Search found 22,446,810 related sites. The first match was a general personal computer overview, the second was a new look at repressed memories using a PC, and the third hit was a site for a product that copies address books to a PC.

One handy feature is a pull-down menu that lets you specify if you want to search all of the words, any of the words, or the exact phrase. Plus, the engine offers an FTP search that lets you look for software, games, MP3s (search by artist or name), screen savers, pictures, and pilotware.

Search Engine Excite-ment

Excite will soon roll out search technology that indexes relevant, content-based slices of the Web, rather than individual sites. The company claims the site will be able to access any and all subjects (not all sites) on the Web.

There's an estimated 800 million to 850 million pages--and growing--currently on the entire World Wide Web, and Excite@Home can access between 250 million and 300 million of them, says Kris Carpenter, director of search products and services. And Carpenter is certain that Excite has something no other engine can provide.

"We know about everything out there," she says. "We're approaching the concept of visiting all sites and recording their attributes in slices."

Expect to see Excite's changes implemented within the next ten days.

Going Big With BigHub.com

Rather than travel to eight separate sites, a metasearch site like the new BigHub.com lets you search with any or all of the following search engines: AltaVista, AskJeeves, Excite, HotBot, Infoseek, Lycos, WebCrawler, and Yahoo.

Once you've entered your query, your results are listed by search engine. As expected, the search term "personal computer" produced an overwhelming response.

When the results come back, you have to scroll down and refine your search to continue in a particular engine. For example, you must select a category to continue searching in Yahoo, or select a definition of your term in AskJeeves. You must check off the appropriate selection to drill down in each engine.

In the future, BigHub plans to position the megasite as a megaportal complete with BigBallot online voting and a bunch of other "big" things.

Which engine has the best, fastest, most reliable technology powering its searches remains to be seen. Often, popularity rather than utility dictates the sites that come back in a search.

"The problem with the newer technologies is that there seems to be a focus on general popularity rather than depth of content," says Jack Staff, chief economist at Zona Research. "That will continue for some amount of time until we get deeper taxonomies."